philip tinari

The first painting I ever saw by David Diao was hanging in a second-floor gallery at the Guangdong Museum of Art. It was November 2005 and his first time showing in the country he had left fifty-seven years earlier, in a sprawling Guangzhou Triennial (the most serious contemporary art exhibition to take place in an official Chinse museum) devoted to the urban urgencies of the Pearl River Delta. He knew the curators—Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist—from an earlier moment, the Paris of the 1990s that he often visited and from which that duo had generated the traveling Asian contemporary circus known as Cities on the Move. This was the Cities on the Move reunion tour, a decade later, with many of the artists, Chinese and otherwise, who had since become staples of the “biennial circuit.” And there, hanging unassumingly on this gallery wall, was a blue silkscreened painting of a map: “Modern Houses in New Canaan Connecticut.” To the right of the map, a listing, architect by architect, with yellow and red markings to signify which of these gems of aestheticized progress was “under threat,” and which had been “already demolished.”

I had an aesthetic moment there, standing in that awkward gallery in a museum building built to fit a mutated modernism, in an institution belonging to a state hellbent on demolition and reconstruction and deeply structured by its own teleologies of progress, in an exhibition trying to articulate a meaningful response to all of this at a moment when the messianic globalism of the 1990s was just beginning to seem passé. This blue painting, its precise appropriated mapping of a suburb sanctified by the interventions of the masters, its textual accents in yellow and red, its smooth palimpsest of a surface: this was the signal image that, for me at least, refracted the entire project of the triennial, the museum, the Chinese state. This one canvas lent the possibility of a cosmopolitan hermeneutics to an exhibition that otherwise ran the risk of simple celebration of the PRC and its hyper-urbanization in its moment of “post-planning.” The knowledge that someone saw a parallel, however oblique, between the moralistic, rarefied preservationism of the American northeast and the corrupt, chaotic exigencies of the Chinese south marked a new sophistication and depth for the critical conversation surrounding the situation of the moment.

In this cycle of paintings Diao moves into a new architectural register, tackling the Da Hen Li House in Chengdu where he was born and raised until age six. The conceit is elegant and simple: Diao left his birth home as a young boy, never to see it again. No photos or plans remained. The house and its grounds were transformed into a Communist office complex, then torn down before he could get back to revisit. Using his memory and those of his assorted aunts and uncles, and calibrated by the fixed dimensions of the tennis court that was the house’s special feature, he conjectured his former reality back into existence. The resulting twenty-four canvases brim with subtle references to the intertwined languages of architecture, painting, and Chinese, as well as to this project of reconstruction through imagination.

The cycle begins with a historical exposition in the form of a timeline, placing the house’s construction and destruction into the larger story of Diao’s life and career. After this opening salvo come a number of canvases based on the drawings made by his relatives—here the enlarged back of an envelope, pasted to the canvas in a subtle homage to the act of mounting traditional Chinese paintings; there the silkscreened, not-to-scale rendering of his civil-engineer uncle. Then there are several meditations on the tennis court, its straight lines and right angles evoking both abstract painting and modern architecture. Some contain hand-scrawled text giving the basics of the historical story as filtered through Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. The fact that Diao’s father died on a tennis court a world away in Manhattan lends an added poignancy to this otherwise rote metric device; and the implicit significance of the court’s presence in terms of the (upper) class position and (Western-leaning) cultural orientation it signifies need not even be spoken—this nonchalance itself a knowing nod to the hierarchies embedded in every so-called “standard” unit, and thus to the project of institutional critique with which he has been associated.

One particularly stirring vertical canvas creates a grid out of canceled envelopes bearing the address of the house, the only textual documentation that confirms its erstwhile existence. Inside this yellowed envelope Diao found several property documents, including a seal-stamped deed, which is reproduced in another of these documentary paintings. But the envelope painting does its work not only in rehashing this lone shred of proof as a defense against madness, but in its formal resonance with the grid of Manhattan and even the elevation of a skyscraper, forms which had long since replaced the Sichuan country manor as Diao’s real home. One isolated gem presents a stylized gingko leaf, referring to the trees that surrounded the house but also to Ellsworth Kelly’s leaf paintings.

Finally there are the text paintings: two each to render the characters “to construct” and “to destroy,” one of the “construct” canvases showing with numbered strokes how to “construct the character to construct.” Another two canvases label the site of his home according to its various incarnations—one proclaiming “Da Hen Li” in vinyl stick-on characters produced in New York’s Chinatown, highlighting the discrepancy between the painted surface and the tacked-on signifier, another proclaiming “Sichuan Daily” in that newspaper’s official calligraphic typeface. These are complemented by two final works in which Diao’s own Chinese characters tell stories, contained by the grids of calligraphy practice notebooks. The stories are simple and expository: “I lived in this house until I was six,” begins one, in characters that look like they might have been written by a six-year-old. Diao makes no secret of his relative illiteracy in Mandarin, itself a direct product of the same historical forces that appropriated the Da Hen Li House. The cycle ends with a drill, interrupted mid-sentence like any good fractured narrative. The sentence, repeated one and one half times, reads “A Chinese who has no Chinese language education.” The sentence structure is reversed in Chinese, such that the repeated clause reads “who has taken no Chinese.” It is cut off mid-sentence but hints at an infinite repetition, like some modernist flourish meant to go on and on, a Greenbergian trajectory extending infinitely, bravely forward. Here again the materiality of the characters themselves—the visual composition of the typeface with which Diao etches out these words—is itself proof of their textual truth, a sort of rebuttal to the art/language divide with which he has worked for so long, made possible by the unique signifying properties of Chinese characters.

David Diao’s position is bookended by Chineseness and architecture, themes which he had until now not chosen to explore together. The thumbnail biographies give us two parallel, somehow equally poignant details: how Diao was born in Chengdu and left under duress at age six when the People’s Republic was founded, how he now spends his free time tending to a home by Marcel Breuer. Between those two points came a painting career on the embers of the New York School, played out against the vicissitudes of a larger art-historical context strangely parallel to those he faced in leaving China—conceptualism eclipsing Greenbergian abstract painting just as the Communists eclipsed the Nationalists. Perhaps coming up against the ends of these two systems has endowed him with a sensitivity to the undersides of the narratives written by their replacements, as well as a healthy skepticism about the linear schematics (Alfred Barr’s birth of modern painting chart, his own progression of homes and studios) with which we simplify history. Diao said in a 1996 interview that he tends to “use [himself] as an instance of a more general condition, and to “locate [himself] as complicitous and thoroughly implicated in the very formations that [he] addresses.” In the Da Hen Li cycle paintings, he is able to do this in a manner no longer simply intellectual and theoretical but now personal and evocative. In this inherently futile act of seeking to reclaim a bygone space and time, Diao places his typical pictorial wit and skepticism into a new context of historical pathos. In exploring the physical building that was literally the site of and container for his Chinese identity, these works by Diao reconcile two of his most prominent interests.

刁德谦的大亨里房子

我第一次看到刁德谦的画是在广东美术馆二楼展厅。时间是2005年11月，他在离开中国五十七年后第一次回到这片土地举办展览，背景是以珠江三角洲的城市急症为主题的巨型展览——第二届广州三年展。九十年代，他经常去巴黎，在那儿结识了三年展的两名策展人：侯瀚如和小汉斯。两人也是在同一时期策划了亚洲当代艺术巡展：移动的城市。十年后，“移动的城市”里的很多中外艺术家已经成为“双年展巡游队”的主力队员，现在他们又在广州重聚。而眼前墙上安静地挂着一幅丝网印刷的蓝色地图：《康涅狄格州纽卡纳安的现代房屋》。地图右侧是逐一排列的建筑师名单，并用黄色和红色的标记标出了这些美化进程中哪些“正面临威胁”，哪些又“已经拆除。”

我所在的这间古怪展厅属于一座专为配合现代主义变异体而建的美术馆，这个机构所属的国家正在不遗余力地拆迁和重建，并深深地被它自己的进步目的论左右，而整个三年展想要努力澄清的，正是在九十年代救世主似的全球主义刚开始显出力不从心的当代，我们应该如何对以上问题做出有意义的回应。刁德谦的作品就在如此背景之下给我带来了一次审美体验。建筑大师的介入把郊区送上神坛，而这幅蓝色作品精确地挪用了该区域的地图，它用红黄两色勾勒出的文本重点，它对表面的流畅重写：至少在我看来，这是折射出三年展的整个项目，折射出美术馆乃至中国国家现状唯一图像。这幅画为展览带来了都市诠释学的可能性，避免其沦为仅仅为了给珠江三角洲及其在“后规划”时代的过度城市化大唱赞歌而举办的庆祝会。不管多么隐晦，有人从美国东北地区自持清高的说教式保护主义和中国南方浮躁混乱的紧要问题之间看出了某种联系。这一事实标志着目前正在进行的批评对话已经取得了一种新的成熟和深度。

在这一轮绘画中，刁德谦进入了一个新的建筑语域，处理对象是成都的大亨里老房。他在那里出生并度过了六年的童年时光。创作构想简单而考究：刁德谦很小就离开出生地，之后再也没有机会见到这座老房子。没有任何照片或建筑图纸存留下来。老房子和庭院最初被改造成一片共产主义办公区，刁德谦还没来得及返乡，房子就已经被彻底拆除。艺术家循着自己和几个叔叔阿姨的记忆，按照老房网球场固定的面积，重新创造了逝去的现实。由此诞生的二十四幅作品充满了对建筑、绘画和中文语言互相交织的微妙指涉，同时也点出了通过想象进行重建的项目主题。

第一件作品以时间轴的形式对历史进行了一番回顾，把老房的修建和拆毁的故事放进刁德谦的更大生活和职业背景中讲述。开门见山后是一系列根据刁德谦亲属的素描创作的作品——贴在画布上的经过放大的信封背面是对装裱过的传统中国国画的微妙致意；职业是土木工程师的叔叔也做了不成比例的描绘。还有几张网球场的图像，画面上的直线和九十度角让人联想起抽象画和现代建筑。有些画的是手写文本，画中文字透过Jung Chang的《野天鹅》吐露了这个历史故事中的若干基本事实。刁德谦的父亲死在大洋彼岸纽约长岛的一个网球场上。这一事实为本来看似机械的几何图案增添了几分沉重。网球场在（上流）社会阶层及其（亲西方的）文化倾向中起到的暗示作用自不必说——这种漠然本身就是对根植于每个所谓“标准”单位里的等级系统的一次意味深长的致意，从而也指向了他一直以来参与其中的体制批评项目。

最让人心潮澎湃的一幅作品是由未寄出的信封组成的信封方阵。信封上印有大亨里的地址——也是确认老房存在过的唯一记录文件。在这个已经泛黄的信封里，刁德谦找到了几张地产文书，包括一份盖着章的地契（他在另外几幅记录性作品里复制了这张地契）。但这幅信封画的作用不仅在于它通过翻新仅有的一点点证据来抵御疯狂，还在于它从形式上很像曼哈顿的街区布局，甚至让人联想到摩天大楼的立视图。而这两者很早就代替四川的乡间庄园成为了刁德谦真正的故乡。其中一幅单独列出的佳作描绘了一片风格化的银杏树叶，不仅表现了曾经围绕老房生长的银杏树，同时也指涉了Ellsworth Kelly的“叶子画”。

最后是文字画：两张“建”字和两张“拆”字，还有一张标出了如何按笔顺“构建‘建’字”。另外两幅画根据老房旧址的不同表现形式对其进行了刻画——一幅模仿纽约唐人街常见的乙烯基贴纸创作的“大亨里”三个字，突出显示了颜料涂抹的画布表面和贴纸符号之间的差异；另一幅用官方字体赫然写着“四川日报”几个大字。结尾的两件作品是对以上所有图像的补充：刁德谦在书法练习本上亲笔写下了自己的故事。 故事很简单，带有说明性质：其中一个的开头是“我六岁以前住在那里”，字体看上去像是出自六岁大的小孩儿之手。刁德谦并不避讳他对汉语几乎一无所知的事实，夺走大亨里老房子的历史洪流也剥夺了他学习汉语的机会。整个系列以一段被中途打断的书法练习结束，就像所有支离破碎但是出色的叙事一样。没有受过中文教育的中国人——这个句子在纸上重复了一次半。虽然被拦腰截断，但戛然而止的句子暗示着画面之外还有无数次重复，如同一部本应继续下去的现代主义乐章，一条永远勇敢延伸的格林堡式轨道。文字本身的实体性在这里得到再次强调——刁德谦镂刻文字所用字体的视觉构造本身就证明了它们的文本真实性，中国字的特性也使他能够对长期以来伴随自己创作的艺术/语言分野提出某种反驳。

支撑刁德谦立场的是中国特色和建筑两大元素。到目前为止，他还没有同时对两者进行过探索。艺术家简短的自传为我们提供了两个同样令人心酸的平行细节：刁德谦如何在成都出生，又是如何随着中华人民共和国的建立不得不在六岁那年离开家乡；如今他如何把空余时间都用在打理Marcel Breuer 设计的家上。这两点之间则是他建立于纽约学派余烬之上的艺术生涯，其背后艺术史大背景的变迁竟然跟他离开中国时面临的国家变化出奇地相似——格林堡式的抽象画在观念主义面前黯然失色，就像民族主义在中国败给了共产主义。 也许诞生于两个系统交接处的特殊立场让他对用一种叙事代替另一种叙事的阴暗面格外敏感，同时也对我们用来简化历史的线性图表（Alfred Barr催生的现代绘画图表，他自己创作的家庭和工作室变动轴）抱有一种健康的怀疑态度。刁德谦在1996年的一次采访中说他倾向于“把自己视为一个更宏大环境里的某个事例”，并“将自身作为一个全身心投入的共谋者置于正在处理的构造之中。”在大亨里系列画的创作中，他的确做到了这一点，不仅从智力和理论层面来看，还是从个人和感召力的角度来说。追回逝去的时间和地点——刁德谦通过这一本质上毫无希望的行为把他典型的构图智慧和怀疑主义精神融入了一个历史挽歌的新背景。在探寻自己中国身份所在并存留的实体建筑过程中，刁德谦成功地用作品调和了他最重要的两个兴趣点。