Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven
26th September, 2025 – 1st November, 2025
Lisson Gallery
67 Lisson Street
London

In his first London show in more than five years, the Chinese abstractionist presents works inspired by the Naxi people of Yunnan and the ancient Dongba scroll, The Road to Heaven.

For his first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery — and his first showing in London in more than five years — the Chinese abstractionist Ding Yi unveils The Road to Heaven, a new body of work timed to coincide with Frieze week. The series draws on the history and cosmology of the Naxi people of Yunnan, in southwestern China, adding a cultural and spiritual dimension to his long-standing visual language. As with much of Ding’s oeuvre, the new drawings and paintings employ a rigorous iconography in the service of a layered, subjective response — less a fixed text than an act of ongoing translation.

Ding began his career in the late 1980s, when, as a student at Shanghai University, he adopted the cross — either as a “+” or an “x” — as his central motif. At first these marks appeared in strict grids, but soon expanded into fluorescent, geometric fields that seemed to echo Shanghai’s headlong economic and architectural rise in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2011, his attention has shifted outward — toward the cosmos, the natural world and the universe — while his work has grown more emotive, less strictly rational.

After a 2022 exhibition in Tibet, Ding began to probe more deeply into local cultural and geographic contexts. In Yunnan, where he made three research visits in 2024, he held extended conversations with scholars and Dongba priests. The Dongba faith, an ancient tradition that fuses animism with Tibetan Buddhism, preserves its teachings in pictographic manuscripts. Among the most striking of these is The Road to Heaven, a funerary scroll that maps the passage of the soul from the earthly realm to the afterlife. It lends its name to the exhibition.

Responding to the scroll’s imagery and symbolism, Ding has produced a group of works on coarse Dongba paper, using acrylic and water-soluble coloured pencil. These compositions transpose the Dongba writing system into dense, cross-hatched schemes, blending cosmology with abstraction. At the centre of the show is The Road to Heaven 2024-B17, a four-panel work in which allegorical landscapes — Nine Black Mountains, the Underworld, the Natural World and Heaven — evoke the soul’s progression across realms.

The exhibition also includes horizontal works on paper from Ding’s long-running Appearance of Crosses series. For the artist, works on paper serve both as experiment and refinement. Here, fields of tiny coloured crosses form mosaic-like constellations. Dense black hatching inset with star-like marks recalls night skies, a motif that has appeared in his practice for two decades. Elsewhere, bands of blue suggest “Qi” and water, elements that, in Naxi belief, underpin life and correspond to the “Twenty-eight mansions” of their astrology.

Completing the presentation is a group of large relief paintings in chiselled basswood. Tiered zigzags evoke the sacred Hengduan mountains of Yunnan, though refracted into psychedelic abstraction. Bold diagonals cut across faint grids, while carved compartments, each handmade, compress a sense of the monumental into the miniature.

Ding Yi: The Road to Heaven opens on the 26th of September, 2025 until the 1st of November, 2025 at Lisson Gallery

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