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M+, Hong Kong, © David Diao
David Diao 刁德謙
Da Hen Li cycle—Confiscated 大亨里：被充公
2007
David Diao’s Confiscated 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 recently been 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.
In Confiscated, the rectangular canvas is saturated in a deep navy blue. The words ‘gov’t offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials + wealthy landlords. p.192. Wild Swans’, are written across the canvas. The text is quoted from the Chinese-born British writer Jung Chang’s autobiographical novel Wild Swans, which chronicles the tumultuous changes in twentieth-century China through several generations of a single family. Diao chooses this excerpt as a way to refer to the history of Da Hen Li, which was commandeered for official use in revolutionary China.
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