Ding Yi: Cross Galaxy at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art

Seeing artist Ding Yi’s retrospective in the futuristic Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, one has to marvel at the fact that the 61-year-old Shanghai native has laboriously sustained, for 35 years and counting, his practice of covering monumental paintings in tiny, hand-drawn plus signs and repetitions of the letter x.

 This practice has been described as unvaried, but viewing around 60 examples from his “Appearances of Crosses” series under one roof offers dramatic proof of the shifts it has undergone.