Appearance of Crosses 1997-B26-B29

Appearance of Crosses 1997-B26-B29 is a four-panel abstract painting on corrugated paper, featuring intersecting "+" and "x" motifs layered in chalk and charcoal. The symbol originates from the crosshair lines in printing, which Ding took from his experience during the Cultural Revolution working in toy-packaging design. His exposure to modern art and design from Europe and the United States at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts College also contributed to his formalist interest. This mark of standardization and industrialization—which remains as Ding’s core vocabulary for the rest of his career—distinguished him from his peers in China, who arrived at abstraction mostly through expressionism and an engagement with ink traditions. Ding’s excessive use of decontextualized, meaningless crosses facilitates contemplation beyond form. The repetitive yet idiosyncratic grids with powdery texture not only give a twist to Euro-American minimalist structures but also make his painting look like cloth, an effect that he employed to challenge the boundaries between contemporary and decorative art. Working on cheap packing material in the format of hanging scrolls further subverts traditional customs and genres. The work represents an important chapter in Ding’s career where his material experimentations complicated the way he used abstraction to reflect specific conditions of Chinese society and its relationship to international artistic currents.