The painting life : David Diao and the mundane identity, 1966-

Abstract

This MPhil thesis outlines the American artist David Diao’s self-aware and critical reconstruction of modernist painting via the mundane. It displays his balance, or conflict between a reverence for the history of abstraction and a skepticism of the trends and institutions that have defined it. Across three chapters I argue Diao bridges a certain gravitas of postwar American painting with a vulnerable humor, refusing the amplification of art history and giving us a model of the artist as a humble, fallible figure. This is also how Diao paints his biography. Born into an esteemed Chengdu family in 1943, he fled to Hong Kong as a refugee of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 before emigrating to New York in 1955. Ten years later he would begin his career there, in the wane of the New York School and the onset of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism and many other movements. Despite the historical importance of his biography, Diao renders its minutiae, opting for a specific and even absurd treatment of the personal that refuses dramatization, and during the 1990s, politicization as a Chinese American or Asian American artist.

To discuss Diao’s early career (1966–1973), I identify a strategy of refusal at the level of his persona and process, that allows him to de-aestheticize gesture in favor of the banausic act. This mundanity is recast in 1990 as an experience of obscurity, as concerns like limited output, personal and professional relationships, the struggle for consistency, even attempts to control the viewer’s experience, become the subject of tandem series regarding Barnett Newman and his own slowing career. Concurrently, as identity politics permeates art in the United States, Diao challenges his racialization as a painter via mistranslation and non sequitur, in a synthesized co-option of color field painting and Asian stereotypes. Throughout this thesis I reframe Diao as a more conceptual artist, drawing on the work of John Baldessari, William Anastasi and On Kawara to better situate his painting. The difficulty of categorizing Diao has persisted with his subversion of proximate movements and his rather mundane mode of critique. This thesis aims to contextualize him, but stops short of definition. For it is through an active, informed view of the history of painting that Diao has succeeded in pushing the medium forward through its recurring “deaths,” encouraging us to always question its stakes in the present.