BOOK:David Diao-Prestel Publishing/ Delmonico Books

Tracing a remarkably varied career, the 400 pages monograph on the painter David Diao follows his stylistic evolution, from Abstraction to genre-defying and candid self-exploration. This book accompanies the first full-scale retrospective of David Diao’s entire oeuvre at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). From the 1960s until the late 70s, Diao sought to build on and break through the complex theoretical foundation laid by his artistic predecessors. Diao looked to the formal language of abstract painting, reflecting on and revising the predominant aesthetic discourses through his work. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Diao took a brief hiatus, partly due to what the artist felt was an unresolvable crisis facing abstraction and formalism. It was at this time that Diao abandoned entirely self-referential artworks, incorporating narrative as a thematic buttress to the painting’s composition.  Other works from the 1990s engage directly with then-current conversations around multiculturalism and identity politics. Since the mid-2000s, Diao’s art has taken a more autobiographical tack. Faced with his first solo exhibition in Beijing in 2008, and understanding that local audiences might not be as familiar with the modernist histories he often addresses, Diao artist decided to meet them halfway by using his childhood home as the subject of a major cycle of paintings. Diao’s most recent works touch on his personal history as a Chinese immigrant in America, modernist architecture, and identity politics. In addition to spectacular reproductions of Diao’s work over four decades, this comprehensive book features illustrations and essays on Diao’s treatment of identity and his aversion to categorization; and analysis of Diao’s work as a method of capturing the process of forgetting and the inherent fallibility of art historical memory. Long overdue, this book celebrates Diao’s unique vision and art.-Efi Michalarou