Solo Exhibition Contemporary Gallery Kunming; The Yunnan University Wu Mayao Museum of Anthropology, Kunming
Curator: Cui Cancan
Artist Ding Yi's latest large-scale solo exhibition, ‘The Winding Path’, will be presented in Kunming, curated by Cui Cancan.
In 2024, Ding Yi traveled three times to the ancient Naxi region of Yunnan. He was deeply drawn to the animism and nature worship of this ancient civilization, its notion of life returning to ancestral lands, the mysterious Twenty-Eight Mansions, and the grand pictorial scroll The Road to Heaven, which describes the soul’s journey. Ding Yi decided to make Naxi and Dongba culture the central direction of this exhibition.
The exhibition is divided into six sections and held across two art institutions. At Contemporary Gallery Kunming, new works by Ding Yi are shown, inspired by The Road to Heaven, the Twenty-Eight Mansions, the traditional Dongba paper, and the Hengduan Mountains. The section “The Recurring Journey” offers a retrospective glimpse into Ding Yi’s work from 1987 to the present, hoping to present the 38-year-long winding road of the ‘cross’ symbol. At the Yunnan University Museum of Anthropology, artifacts from the Naxi people are exhibited alongside Ding Yi’s travel sketches from his three visits to the Naxi regions, as well as a documentary filmed by a Tibetan director, portraying the Naxi people's journey back to their homeland.
These two venues offer two distinct contexts: one contemporary, one historical/anthropological/archaeological. They also present two different positions: a shift from ‘them’ to ‘us’; from a gaze that looks down on the Naxi, to one that looks up in reverence. These transformations point to the heart of the exhibition: how to find a third path between East and West—not merely the tail end of Western modernism and abstract art, nor a simple historical reflection of a particular region.
The Winding Path is Ding Yi’s path back to the origins of abstract spirit; it is also his search for inspiration—toward the highlands, the peaks, the ancient, and the natural. Just like the Naxi people, thousands of years ago, who followed the guidance of the North Star from the distant north, arriving here and formulating their own calendar and script along the way.
‘Journeying’ and ‘Winding Upward’ have become Ding Yi’s most important working methods in recent years, and they mark a significant turning point in the evolution of his “cross” symbol. Unlike site-specific art that often assumes a top-down stance, the ‘winding path’ is a path that seeks revelation, tempers the soul, and reconstructs the subject. It is in this sense that we can understand what Ding Yi means by ‘looking up’.
In certain respects, the spiritual aspiration behind Ding Yi’s The Winding Path points toward the premodern. In 1987, Ding Yi began his work with the ‘cross’ motif, originating from modernism. In the 1990s, he entered a conceptualist phase, formulating the principle that the ‘cross’ would be his sole content and form. Yet, he resisted sacrificing the sensuous world, seeking instead to preserve the textures of history and reality.
After 2000, shaped by the urbanization of Shanghai, Ding Yi returned to the symbolic resonance of the ‘cross’ within reality. By 2021, through journeys to Lhasa, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Ningbo, and Kunming, he once again reconnected with the energy of the classical and the mythic. But The Winding Path has no terminus—it sways fiercely between the poles of locality and globalization. Ding Yi searches for the primal wisdom of religious philosophy and the Eastern path. Everything returns in cycles: each transformation of the ‘cross’ is a reincarnation in the life of the ‘cross’ itself.
The Road to Heaven, this ancient mythic painting, becomes the vessel that ferries the ‘cross’ from modernism into conceptualism, then into the premodern. It climbs, layer by layer, over nine black mountains, from the human world to the divine realm. Or rather, through Ding Yi’s winding ascent, these ‘crosses’ have reestablished a connection with the living world: with human history, human origins, human loss, and the relationship between humans and ancient land, tradition, and nature. Ding Yi knows well that only by fulfilling the need for reconciliation between humanity and nature can we approach truth and the origin of the cosmos.
And yet, these ancient civilizations today resemble faint fireflies in the night. With sensitivity, devotion, and reverence, Ding Yi uses the faint glow of the ‘cross’ to illuminate the winding path.
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