David Diao: A Picaresque Tale of Ruins

David Diao’s paintings over time have been oddly resonant with their historical moments. Diao began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1967, and Untitled (1969) stood out in the exhibit “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” for its monochromatic scale and subtlety of gesture. A glowing pale pink with a gentle moire effect belied the aggressive and rather silly athletics of repeatedly running from a distance to sweep a dripping sponge of paint over the large horizontal field propped against the wall. This entire exhibit was shot through by multiple and varied desires to take painting to the next level at a time that it was under siege, but it was in Diao’s painting that a certain allegiance to Modernist painting was held, even to the medium-specific aim of revealing the supporting stretchers as a mark of tension in painting’s support. For Artforum in 1969 Emily Wassermann wrote of Diao's paintings that “...these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not sensed as tactile or palpable.” * Sheer opticality is code for Modernist painting’s achievement, and at this time it was both notable and belated.

Cardboard tubes, push brooms and squeegees came into use during the seventies, but Diao eventually abandoned such approaches as they were “too technological in their thinking.”** In the ‘80s Diao realized along with everyone else that everything he was doing was already a type, that no empirical research within a technological approach to painting was going to ever bust out of convention, as convention is all there is. In response to this "end of painting" other painters began to appropriate styles one after the other, such as Ross Bleckner or Phillip Taaffe, or like David Reed to treat the brush stroke as a free-floating signifier so slick that it might slide across the surface with the click of a mouse. Faced with Postmodernism’s refusal of authenticity and origin, Diao worried over what it meant to “take painting to the next step.” Modernist self-criticism entered the scene, but in the guise of other technologies absorbed into the field of painting: the famous photograph of Malevich’s first show, Alfred Barr’s chart, eye charts, graphs and statistical diagrams marking the sales and exhibition of the artists own work, served as templates for the compositional field. Any distinctions between medium-specific self-criticism and anecdotal self-referentiality were lost in these maneuvers to the point that in Diao's postmodern hands, painting had become colorfully picaresque, somewhere between romance and satire in its enterprise and failure.

Diao explains that the critic Robert Pincus Witten referred to his early paintings, such as Untitled (1969), as ‘oriental screens’ linking Diao’s Chinese heritage to his work. This was long before identity politics was all the rage, and Diao “thought it was a denigration at the time, and it pushed my hand. I began to use Warhol’s synthetic color, and it was only then that I came close to High Modernism and Warhol’s kitsch.” As his art historical references became increasingly personal, he rose to the challenge that Pincus-Witten set before him so long ago, and began to use Bruce Lee as his altar ego, the pop-culture icon standing in for Diao the action painter. More reserved than this brazen parody is Lying 1, 2000, a silkscreened photograph of Diao lounging in a Chinese moon-gazing chair, facing us and set against a Jackson Pollock. This image in turn is set against an expansive monochromatic field. With his own painter’s identity in the languorous pose of the colonialist’s imagination, this is not simply a one-liner but is infused with a longing that, like Manet’s Olympia, implicates painter and viewer alike.

Longing fuses with mourning in Endangered Species 2, 2004, a map of modern houses in New Canaan Conn., with a corresponding key showing those houses that have been demolished and those that are at risk. Against the deep blue monochrome of an architect’s plan, an appropriated graphic system tells the story of Modernism’s demise in the face of newly formed suburban identities appropriating from a more distant past and in search of something bigger. In Sitting in the Glass House, 2003, Diao plants himself in Philip Johnson's house. Johnson died only two years later - visiting the house at the very end of Johnson's life, Diao is gathering up the daily news at the moment of loss and preservation.

Born in 1943, Diao left his home in Chengdu - claimed by the Communist Party for office space - at the age of six, eventually joining his father in New York. He never saw this home again, returning 30 years later to find that it had been demolished. To some extent identifying with his father’s role as an engineer for Robert Moses, alongside of becoming a painter Diao is a connoisseur of Modern architecture. His own home is the Marcel Breuer Wolfson Trailer House. Even though this is one of John Paul Getty’s elite Spartan mansions, the trailer home fused to the walls of the house exhibits what is now a blend of high Modernism and Pop culture in the place where he lives. Diao spends much of his time obsessively preserving this house and campaigning for its survival in the face its extinction.

A sense of loss relating to his own identity appears in Diao’s most recent paintings. In 1991, Diao began exhibiting in Taiwan, and in that same year his father died on a tennis court in New York. Diao now exhibits in Beijing, and in his recent exhibition, March 1-April 5th at Courtyard Gallery Diao exhibited a cycle of paintings named for the house he had known as a child, “Da Hen Li House.” In From My Memory (2007) the house plan appears to the far right of a long horizontal field. Most prominent is the red tennis court against what is otherwise an expanse of dark green, and the stairs that mark the passage from the interior to the exterior of the house. The blankness of the remaining monochromatic field is what can no longer be remembered. The red tennis court reads like a Chinese seal and a burial plot holding the bare memories of a man displaced so long ago that he no longer knows the language, and whose earlier sweeping horizontal gestures were an embodied erasure of his cultural past as much as they were the making of an oriental screen.

An aesthetic of ruins is in full play in Chinese contemporary art. David Spalding describes contemporary Chinese photography as driven by the haunting ruins of “the most radical restructuring of urban space on earth.” China may have bypassed Modernism, but David Diao is in tune with its postmodern ruins, taking up his residency in a field of bold and fragile geometries.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Emily Wassermann, “Three Younger Artists, “ Artforum, Summer 1969, p. 31
**All artist’s statements are from personal interview.

Photos courtesy of David Diao, in order of appearance: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 72x96", Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, gift of Ruth Ruosh; Barnett newman, Chronology of Work, 1990-92, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 96x180", FRAC Bretagne;Lying 1, 2000, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 79x115"; Endangered Species 2, 2004, acrylic, silkscreen and enamel on canvas, 84x108"; From My Memory, 2007, vinyl, acrylic and oil on canvas, 42x78"; Demolish 2, 2008, acrylic, vinyl and oil on canvas, 24x24".

Catherine Spaeth