DAVID DIAO

Borrowing motifs from artists such as Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Barnett Newman, and others, Diao directly inserts his artistic influences and predecessors into the work. These ‘ancestors’ are shown alongside familial ones, blurring cultural history with Diao’s autobiography. Known for his keen ability to translate content as form, Diao’s minimal compositions, which often incorporate stylised text, are both tributes to and wry interrogations of his ancestry, and legacy. The title of the exhibition comes from a 1965 film of the same name, by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s. The suggestive phrasing of the title, as well as the story’s multiple linguistic and cultural translations, relates to the paintings in the exhibition.

In the early Nineties, Diao began to incorporate biographical elements that include his own career histories, as well as themes of his Chinese heritage, emigration, and displacement. Being of two cultures, yet not totally integrated in either, has been a touchstone of his practice since. Now, in ’Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, Diao brings together recurring themes, icons, and histories, substantiating a bridge between two poles of his identity.

Five decades into his practice, Diao’s most recent works push into this new terrain, personally and formally. Since abandoning gestural abstraction in the mid-seventies, his paintings have been characterized by smooth surfaces and solidly painted sonorous color achieved by repeated passes with palette knives. Yet, for some time, Diao has considered expanding his practiced methodology by experimenting with other kinds of surface and facture. Hiding In Plain Sight (2018) and Berlin Chair Unassembled (2018) are among the few instances where he has allowed a more gestural and open surface to remain in the finished work. It is another ancestral reference, in a way, recalling his process-oriented paintings of the early seventies, and may portend future works to come - a radical stride for an artist of Diao’s significance.