until Sunday November 15 2015

UCCA
T : +86 10 5780 0200
798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxiangiao Lu
100015 Beijing
China

The artist’s first full-scale retrospective, “David Diao” includes more than 90 works borrowed from public and private collections in North America, Europe, and Asia. The exhibition seeks to present Diao’s work as a field of visual and conceptual adjacencies from which multivalent, unexpected connections can emerge.

It spans all phases of Diao’s career, from his early abstractions to a suite of paintings about his refugee years in 1950s Hong Kong, completed especially for the exhibition. Further groupings are dedicated to Diao’s ongoing interest in the work and career of Barnett Newman; the complex and intertwined histories of Modernism and revolutionary politics in Europe, Russia, and the United States; the mutually determined relationship between identity politics, masculinity, and institutional critique as seen in works that explore his Chinese-American identity and his putative career shortcomings; and architecture and memory, particularly in relation to Diao’s lost childhood home, the Da Hen Li House in Chengdu.