David Diao’s First Sketch is part of a cycle of works entitled Da Hen Li. Created between 2007 and 2008, the series unearths Diao’s memories of the Da Hen Li house, his childhood home in Chengdu, China. Diao lived at Da Hen Li until the age of six, when he emigrated to Hong Kong, shortly before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Thirty years later, upon returning to his home town for the first time, Diao discovered that his former family residence had been recently razed to the ground, leaving almost no record of its existence. Comprising paintings of various sizes and media, including hand-drawn and ruled floor plans, silk-screened property deeds, laser-printed sketches, and texts in English and Chinese, the cycle is the artist’s attempt to trace his childhood through a personal recollection of Da Hen Li’s spaces.
First Sketch is one of several works in the cycle that remap the floor plan of the Da Hen Li house. Here, a standard-size envelope is attached to a small rectangular canvas, painted in ochre. Diao’s preliminary sketch of Da Hen Li is laser-printed onto the envelope. The rough outlines of the compound’s grounds and the use of an envelope suggest that the plan was drawn from memory in an impromptu way, and it reflects Diao’s subjective experiences of Da Hen Li.