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M+, Hong Kong, © David Diao
David Diao 刁德謙
Da Hen Li cycle—Gingko 大亨里：銀杏
2007
David Diao’s Gingko 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.
Gingko is a rectangular painting of a gingko leaf, depicted in two shades of green. The work refers to the large ginkgo tree that stood near the centre of the Da Hen Li compound, one of the traces of memory and the passage of time that Diao has kept of the space. It also references the 1973 botanical drawing of the same name by American artist Ellsworth Kelly.
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