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M+, Hong Kong, © David Diao
David Diao 刁德謙
Da Hen Li cycle—To Construct 1 大亨里：建一
2008
David Diao’s To Construct 1 is part of a cycle of works entitled Da Hen Li. Created between 2007 and 2008, the cycle 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, eventually settling in New York. 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 remaining 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 reconnect with his childhood and his family home, and it represents the fragmentary nature of memory.
To Construct 1 is a painting with the Chinese character jian, which means ‘to build’ or ‘to construct’. The canvas, which is painted in a colour that is reminiscent of student workbooks, is divided into nine equal sections, evoking the square calligraphy boxes used for practicing writing Chinese characters. Reflecting Diao’s desire to organise information rationally and expressively, the character is perfectly centred in the nine quadrants, and each stroke is labelled with a number, indicating its place in the writing sequence. The position and construction of the character not only correspond with Diao’s overall project to reconnect with his childhood, but also link up with his larger interests in geometric abstraction. The work and the character depicted point to the building of the Da Hen Li house, which was designed by Diao’s grandfather, as well as to the Demolish paintings from the cycle, which refer to the house’s destruction.
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