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M+, Hong Kong, © David Diao
David Diao 刁德謙
Da Hen Li cycle—Wild Swans 大亨里：鴻
2007
David Diao’s Wild Swans 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. In Wild Swans, a highly saturated dark-ochre canvas is divided into segments with white lines, evoking a tennis court—a touchstone for Diao in his reconstruction of Da Hen Li’s grounds. At the centre of the picture plane are the words ‘My father was overseeing the provincial party newspaper, the Sichuan Daily. P.275 / Wild Swans’, written in cursive text. The text is quoted from the Chinese-born British writer Jung Chang’s novel Wild Swans, which chronicles the tumultuous changes in twentieth-century China through several generations of a single family. Obliquely referring to the history of his own house, which was coincidentally also used as the headquarters of the Sichuan Daily newspaper in the 1970s, Diao addresses both the changing political climate and the memory of his late father, who died on a tennis court in New York in 1990.
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