In the luxurious south of France, between Aix-En-Provence and the Luberon National Park in one of the oldest winemaking regions, there is a sprawling vineyard where exceptional wine, art and architecture coexist harmoniously. Château La Coste, which opened to the public in 2011, is a bucolic art center offering a complete aesthetic experience: visitors can sip the vineyard’s finest wines, stroll along the wooded art walk that winds through the 500-acre estate and explore five indoor exhibition spaces that host shows of works by some of the most acclaimed names in the contemporary art scene.
There are pieces by Fernand Léger, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, just to name a few. Among the shows on view this summer are a presentation of vivid and humorous paintings by California-born artist Joe Masler in the beautifully designed Renzo Piano Pavilion and a display of dreamy works by French painter Claire Tabouret. Hirst’s latest series, “The Secret Gardens Paintings,” is on view through December in the Bastide Gallery while sculptures and lightboxes from the artist’s 2017 “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” are in the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium.
Château La Coste’s striking glass Niemeyer Pavilion, meanwhile, is hosting the first major retrospective of the work of Chinese artist Ding Yi, “Prediction and Retrospection.” This show marks the artist’s first European survey and provides a significant opportunity to discover his visionary practice. The exhibition curator, Alfredo Cramerotti, told Observer that the show is intended to present a significant ‘slice’ of Ding Yi’s career, as not many people in Europe are familiar with his work.
“The idea was to select several works that represented different eras of his career, the four decades of work, and the various bodies of work that the artist went through,” Cramerotti said. “It was a long time in the making because his works are not readily available—most of them are in public institutions or private foundations, and some of the more historical ones from the 1980s and 1990s belong to his private archive and are not allocated for exhibitions. It was important to create a journey in terms of the viewer’s experience in the space and time trajectory through the works, and I’m very happy we managed that.”
Observer also spoke with the artist to learn more about the show’s leading themes and how he and Cramerotti established a meaningful conversation with this beautiful space. The title of the show refers to the “absolute matrix” that Yi uses, linking his practice to both the most advanced technological developments and ancient symbologies humans have achieved over time. As Cramerotti explained, the title was inspired by the artist’s signature gridded framework, standing as a symbol of rationality and rules, which provided the curatorial rationale for the show.
SEE ALSO: Our Guide to the Best Exhibitions in Athens This Summer
At the same time, this idea of the grid is also the basic structure for today’s digital realm, the foundational element whereupon everything else is built, connected, experienced and circulated. “The mathematical pattern of the digital layers of our hybrid lives are both reflected (in retrospect) and anticipated (in advance) through the paintings presented. The exhibition is a fascinating space/time traveling experience through the lens of non-representation,” Cramerotti said. Ultimately, the works by Ding Yi traverse cultural revolutions, economic booms, societal changes and technological achievements of his home country, China. While not showing them specifically, all those events are evoked through the patterns created by the symbols x and +.
Over the years, the artist was able to reduce his pictorial language into an extremely minimal code, limited to a single signature symbol: a rudimentary cross depicted alternately as x and +. When asked how he reached this minimal code and what it meant for him to paint just those two signs into new constellations, the artist elaborated on the historical reasons behind his language. “Chinese painting has been influenced by former Soviet socialism and realism since the 1950s,” he told Observer. “Starting in the 1980s, during my student years, I began to reflect on the entire social structure and the ideological aspect of art. I wanted my work to keep away from mainstream ideological narratives. For me, using such symbols is a way to dismantle the inherent mechanical framework of representing subjects with realism, but instead, to bring art back to a state of non-representation or meaninglessness.” It was, he said, an attempt to restart the search for the origins of art, to return to the beginning and to redefine painting where the x and + can be symbolic substitutes or merely just strokes and parts of the painting. “Painting, through the construction of an integrated visual language, expresses connections with the real world and resonates with the changing of times.”
His work is dictated by a strict set of rules aiming to abstract completely the resulting paintings from any representation, as well as from any meaning and emotion, and so to archive instead what he describes as representations of spirit. All this makes his artistic practice sound more like one of self-discipline and self-annihilation, such as what philosopher Saint Augustine described, claiming that self-discipline was crucial for spiritual growth and living a virtuous life. An idea, or ideal, that was anticipated even before by the stoics, with Epictetus saying that true freedom comes only from self-mastery, achieved through discipline and control over one’s desires and actions.
The artist spoke about this process of reduction and control more as a relationship between rationality and sensibility. Continuing our conversation, Yi explained that all of his works are based on a gridded framework, which represents rationality and rules, but that framework allows for infinite freedom and can accommodate sensibility while infinitely extending. “My working method is never to draft before I start work,” he said. “Facing the grid, sensibility, and randomness are needed to enhance the vitality of the painting. Vitality is an important element of painting, while unexpectedness is the driving force of creation. Some critics, when commenting on my work, draw parallels to Buddhist meditation or the duality of relationships in the traditional Chinese board game Go.”
In the confined grid, when white and black intersect, they create contradictions, conflicts, resistance and competition. However, according to the artist, they are also mutually relational and balanced with a chess-like rule, contributing to harmonic unity. Combined and in sequence, these signs can look like pixels, reminding one of a digital aesthetic, anticipating or abstracting into art the binary code that rules it.
When asked about this relationship to the digital realm, Yi clarified: “Using the grid as a foundation is the most basic structure for all digital art today. This structure originates from mathematics. Consequently, my works are also filled with a so-called mathematical relationship. For painting, mathematical relationships are a kind of rhythm, representing a certain relationship between growth and restraint. These relationships can either be infinite or fragmentary. Furthermore, these mathematical relationships are also reflected in the scattered center composition of the paintings. It also refers to a multi-dimensional center with multi-layered aggregation and multi-cluster relationships.”
Considering this hyper-technological aspect, which stands in contrast to the profoundly manual aspect at the heart of his practice, we asked Yi if there was a relationship between the work and the extremely accelerated process of modernization China went through in a few decades, first becoming the “factory of the world” and then also a leader in technological innovation and electronics.
Ding Yi confirmed that most of the inspiration for this work comes from the trajectory of China’s development. “This journey has unfolded in a state of acceleration, full of clamor and contradictions.” he explained, “I hope my work connects with the reality of development in China and the world. Rapid development changes our ideas and thinking, so I always aim to reflect a concept change through my creations. Whether it stems from the urbanization process or the rapid development of the digital artificial intelligence industry, these changes in social and life experiences have led to continuous iteration and development in my paintings over the past forty years.”
Yi’s aesthetic combines the fast-paced rhythm of the new urban life in China, the constant flow of data and information of the digital realm, with something timeless and ancient, the primordial symbol of a cross or an attentive practice connecting minds and hands in meticulously drawing them on canvas. We also asked Cramerotti how he would describe this relationship between innovation and tradition within the artist’s work.
“Ding Yi is an innovator not in technique but in critical thinking; his practice steered away from propaganda and social realism from the start and instead channeled the changes in society, economy, culture, and worldview through a system that let him explore and include many perspectives, reducing them and distilling them to their essence,” he said. “Distillation is probably a key work in talking about his artistic journey. The ‘digital matrix’ that visually hits the viewer at first from his work is precisely the result not only of time mapping but also of those societal codes that inform our lives now when we are both physical and virtual at the same time. It’s like when you open the ‘code version’ of a website page in your browser—you see symbols and ciphers, and you know that they lead to visuals, texts, and sounds, even if you cannot see them in that form. Ding Yi’s work is the same in that sense—and that’s what is thrilling about his work about innovation and tradition.”
Presenting Ding’s work for the first time in Europe reveals some unexpected parallels between his aesthetic and other artists in the 1970s who, in France and elsewhere in Europe, explored new ideas of geometric and optical abstraction inspired by new technology and the space race. “We know much about optical art and abstraction from Western artists, much less from Asian artists,” Cramerotti said. “We do, of course, have movements like the Dansaekhwa artists in South Korea, but for the most, we refer to optical and abstraction through a Western lens. That was ‘undone’ for me by Ding Yi, whose work is well-known in Asia. Still, it is relatively unknown in Europe, for instance—and I discovered someone who not only worked on non-representation from the beginning of his career but actively has approached societal and cultural changes through this focused practice. It reminded me of the work of Giorgio Morandi, for instance, someone who still had lives of cups, bottles and vases for most of his career and yet managed to transfer all the societal upheavals of Italy throughout his time. Different visuals, same consistency and focus.”
As with most of the shows at Château La Coste, the works are installed in the space in close conversation with the architecture and its natural surroundings. Cramerotti’s curatorial approach was deeply informed by the architectural features of the Niemeyer Pavilion, which offered opportunities to relate works to details that might otherwise go unnoticed. “During one of my early site visits, I noticed the lines of the joints of the concrete floor to be at odd angles, more like 60/70 degree angles than the customary 90-degree, and that gave me the idea for a framework, for positioning the works in the space, rather than on the walls, a part of the architectural volume,” he said. “The external walls are mostly made of glass panes, floor to ceiling, with a black joint running vertically to connect one with the other; that gave me the idea for the black frames designed to support the eight pairs of paintings shown in the middle of the space, which pairing from a different era and body of work but having the same size. It was a long conversation with Ding Yi’s studio to secure those ‘pairings’ as some belong to his private archive and are not usually available for exhibitions. The show was five years in the making, but I’m glad we got there in the end.”
“Prediction and Retrospection” by Ding Yi is on view through September 15 at Château La Coste, Le-Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France.
