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David Diao 刁德謙
Da Hen Li cycle—Two Tennis Balls 大亨里：兩個網球
2011
David Diao’s Two Tennis Balls 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, 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 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.
Two Tennis Balls is a simple rectangular composition that reflects Diao’s unique approach to geometric abstraction, in which colour and form can be read for their visual qualities and also have a connection to reality or to a narrative. At the centre of a canvas covered in teal green are two bright yellow circles that suggest tennis balls. The work evokes a banal scene on a tennis court—a motif in this cycle, and a touchstone for Diao in his reconstruction of the Da Hen Li house. The work also references Painting with Two Balls (1960), by American painter Jasper Johns.
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