When political circumstances made it difficult for him to continue working as an independent artist, he began to exhibit in galleries in Sweden, Vienna, Los Angeles, London, Oxford, Sydney, and Rotterdam.
In 2004 Ding Fang generously donated a set of Zhongguo Meishubao (229 issues in 9 bound volumes) to the Asia Art Archive collection.
The Red Brigade Manifesto, written by him in 1987, explains his choice in the context of his tragic vision of human history, which is not so much a leap forward towards any greater purpose but an accumulation of ruins of grand dreams.
[8] The main themes of the Red Brigade Manifesto are: In the solemnity of self-sacrifice, we find common points of support, we thirst to re-create life in the depths of our hearts and in the course of our journey to the other shore, we reach the sublime and when we collide with eternity, we sense the call to mystery.
However, the appearance of the market economy had already transformed the political and social terrain of China, as exemplified by the "silicon valley", Zhongguancun, booming just south of Yuanmingyuan.
[11] "In June 1986, the year after the Jiangsu Exhibit, Ding Fang, Yang Zhilin, Shen Qin, Cao Xiaodong, Chai Xiaogang, Xu Lei, Xu Yihui, Guan Ce, and Yang Yingshen,"because of their shared style, banded together as a Surrealist group under the name The Color Red: Travel, and Ding fang wrote for the group "Sayings of the Color Red: Travel".
"[12] Ding Fang is known primarily for his bold, richly colored landscape paintings, in which he attempts to represent China's mountains and plains with historical and cultural meanings.
His monumental abandoned earth-colored cities yield the symbolic pulsating energy of bygone cultures in the series Sword-Shaped Willpower.
This trajectory suggests an escape from the present to find more eternal values in ancient culture and in the vigorous life depicted in his earlier pictures such as Harvest.
He sought to explore the rational structure of nature through images of the constant stillness of the land and depictions of the cycle of human life.
Ding Fang's understanding of heavy color and brush strokes was drawn from his own experience of life and the influence of Georges Rouault.
When his characters encounter some grand historical monument from the past standing in the wasteland and are buffeted by the winds of cold reality, they are moved naturally to tears.
The series title "The call and birth" was the full embodiment of this style, its most important characteristic being that the turning of the earth bore the image of an enormous mask, and the shape of the mountain fortress was more solid and succinct.
Through these images he artist explained that even though the surface of the land suggested that the earth was utterly exhausted, it concealed a powerful latent vitality which, when addressed with the eyes of history, will speak.