On February 5, 1989, the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition opened at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. It was, by any measure, a watershed moment: it marked the culmination of the ’85 New Wave movement, the landmark staging of a generation’s artistic ambitions that gathered nearly everyone who would later become a canonical name in Chinese contemporary art. The presentation lasted two hours before a performance by Xiao Lu, in which she fired a real handgun into her own installation, forced its closure. Among the works on the walls were early paintings from Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses series, which he had only begun making in the previous year. They stood out from the rest of the works on view. In a room charged with expressionistic urgency and political grievance rendered through body and symbol, his canvases consisted of color organized around a schematic unit, stripped of narrative, ideology, and perhaps even the desire to be understood. This peripheral position has since characterized Ding Yi’s relationship to Chinese contemporary art.