T'ing Yin-Yung (Ding Yanyong)

Sotheby's Hong Kong, 9 April, 2008, lot 804
Acquired directly from the above sale by the present owner 

The Cosmorama Pictorial, no. 339, Hong Kong, September 1984, cover

This work is in overall very good condition. There is no apparent inpainting under UV light examination.
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Natural and Uninhibited, Technical and Refined

Ding Yanyong’s Red Lady

Kao Mayching, the former Director of the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, once described the artistic lineage of Ding Yanyong as “one source, three veins”. The “three veins” are Ding’s three main subjects of expertise: oil painting, watercolour, and seal carving. After mastering all three disciplines, Ding applied knowledge from each to the benefit of the others, and in the end, he combined the three fields to shape his distinctive style as an artist. Oils were the starting point of Ding’s creative career, which began in the 1920s, when he left home to study at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (today, the Tokyo University of the Arts), and reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Red Lady (Lot 1020) is a rare piece from that period: a large-scale portrait in acrylics that also features appealing elements of calligraphy and inscription. In September 1984, the Hong Kong magazine Cosmorama Pictorial published a feature on Ding, and chose this painting for the cover, demonstrating its representative nature and importance to his career.

Abandoning the Form to Concisely Capture the Spirit

Ding Yanyong worked on portraiture throughout his career. The foundation for this element of his artistry was laid during his academic training in Japan, and the Tokyo University of the Arts has added his Self Portrait from 1925 to its permanent collection in order to preserve one of his earliest efforts in the discipline. After returning to China, Ding often painted portraits of society ladies. Then, when he taught at the New Asia College and the Chinese University of Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s, he often demonstrated techniques by using students as models. In those years, oil paints were in short supply, so Ding usually painted on size-12 fibreboards (60cm x 40cm); in contrast, Red Lady is a large-scale work on a size-30 frame (90.5cm x 60.5cm). Another relatively uncommon aspect of the painting is that Ding painted it on canvas, which demonstrates the importance that he attached to this particular work.

Compared to earlier works by Ding Yanyong, Red Lady exhibits a clear inclination towards formal simplification; it is an attempt to use the most simple lines possible to capture the body language and facial expression of the human figure. Unlike the normal practice of building an image through the addition of paint, these lines were created through subtraction from blocks of colour by brushtip or knife edge, and the result is comparatively fresh and robust. According to statistics in the main publications of Ding’s career, this work is likely his only large-scale portrait painted with this technique of first laying down layers of paint and then scraping it away. After Ding relocated to Hong Kong, he delved into the study of primitive art, and he collected and researched Taiwanese aboriginal wood carvings. These wood carvings are simple and direct in form; they are essentially outlines nimbly carved out of wood with blades. Ding also painted still lifes of these sculptures, and it is not hard to imagine how he drew on their aesthetic characteristics to create the simplified human figure in this painting.

Acrylic Colours with the Charm of Wulouhen

In addition to its simplified form, this portrait also demonstrates an evolution in Ding Yanyong’s use of colour. Early on in his career, the influence of Fauvism led Ding to use intense colours in his oil paintings; later, as his self-restraint increased and his field of vision broadened, his philosophy of colour gradually came to reflect other influences. In Red Lady, the application of colour does not emphasise the distinction between the figure and the background, and on the contrary, it seems to intentionally blend the two. There is no sense of depth formed between the bright red outline of the figure and the ink-black background; rather, the painting possesses a richly abstract sense of being formed of colour blocks. Beginning in the 1950s, Ding began producing large quantities of calligraphy and ink paintings. Traditional artistic ideas and aesthetics gradually permeated his oil paintings as well. Large areas of the background of Red Lady are covered in hues of burnt black and blackish-green, manifestating the classical notion that black ink contains five colours, and the mottled appearance of his applications of colour recall the natural beauty of the calligraphy technique known as Wulouhen, or “water stains on the wall”. The head of the figure in the painting is the same colour as the background, but Ding applied thin lines of highly transparent, ochre-red paint to create the outline of a face. The shape of the face extends and blends into the background, producing an exquisitely natural artistic effect that disguises the evidence of the artist’s hand.

An Elegant and Novel Design of Seal Characters and Pictographs

Ding Yanyong’s study of seal cutting and collection of seals was unique among the pioneers of Chinese Modernism, and this interest of his contributed to breakthroughs in his oil painting. When Ding first began using ancient characters in his paintings in the 1950s, he usually used oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions for their simple elegance; later, he switched to the ancient characters and pictorials of seals, which he liked for their design elements and graphicness. The upper-right part of the background of Red Lady, an area of transplanted ancient characters, features the artist’s seal-carving skills. According to the Ding Yanyong Seal Album, the three ancient characters in the column on the left read “Yong Zhi Nie,” (“The Seal of Yong”), and the fish design on the right combines the seal-character for “Ding” and the pictograph for “Yu” (“Fish”). Ding was particularly fond of the fish pictograph for both its graphic nature and its connotations. His seal album contains numerous seals carved with “Yu” and “You Yu” (“To Have Fish”, an auspicious homophone of “To Have Plenty”). Ding once said that “the lines of the pictorial possess perpetual strength and interminable content. The vigorous spirit of the seal is greater than that of other ancient tools”. The pictograph and seal images in the background of Red Lady increase the historic charm and cultural depth of the painting while also cleverly echoing the traditional Chinese method of signing and dating one’s artwork. The result is an ideal assimilation of oil painting, an originally Western style, into the field of Chinese art.