Broken Monument

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Li Daiyun: Broken Monument, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with the artist. The exhibition features twelve acrylic-on-canvas paintings from the years 2014 - 2017, at a time when the artist was preoccupied by the failed promises of China’s modern history, in her own and in her parents’/grandparents’ generation. These are moments of optimism and innocence seen through the retro-sadness of hope lost. They are about youthful exuberance at the advent of the Cultural Revolution and then again just before China’s efflorescence retracted in the new millennium. You will see no explicit political statements but subtle subversions of recognizable symbols and figures that act as mood and shadow signposts to disillusion. Some of her paintings are dependent on each other for full context. The canvas titled ‘A Boat’ seems to recreate a black-and-white photograph of little girls being rowed in a boat. We are likely witnessing a mid-century moment in Maoist China, and though blurry, the natural mood is of childlike fun and glee. But in the portrait series titled ‘Singing In The Boat’ each girl is realized in a grim mood, each face shut and often contorted. What potentially served as a propaganda snapshot of collective organized happiness reveals hidden truths of individual misery. The subtlety of the messaging is itself emblematic of the pressure on individual expression. To view Li Daiyun’s paintings is to steep the eye in the narratives of time. Her images straddle genres: neo-realist, post-impressionist, verging on abstraction. Yet they are certainly representational. And they always carry a subtext in time. They reference the emotional moment of the subject, the time the images allude to and the time in the artist’s history that they were made - all comprise the multiplicity of contexts permeating the images. They float in a matrix of time narratives, hidden or explicit stories, forming and animating the figuration. As a result, they seem to be dissolving or assembling before our eyes, in the struggle to tell their secrets. In the artist’s words: I have always been concerned with the relationship between people and social forms, as well as the impact and psychological projection of different natural or political environments on human living conditions. In my view, the past several decades of China’s history—from its founding to the present—have been marked by immense upheaval and rapid transformation, like a condensed example of human history itself. Captured through images, these moments become countless slices that can be examined from multiple perspectives—human nature, social structures, belief systems, and more. The drama, subversion, and absurdity here are endless. This series of paintings was created between 2014 and 2017. The figures depicted come from everyday moments in the lives of my grandparents ́ and parents ́ generations during the 1950s and 1960s—a brief period when a new order and a new belief system had just been established, and everything was still colored by immense faith and hope. The madness and collapse of the deification movement, along with the endless lies and hypnosis used like a haze to sustain a godlike idol, still seemed far away. Just like the undeniably globalized era in which I created these works, where pandemics, wars, movements under various banners, and the shifting tides of world politics also seemed distant. Through painting, I attempt to synchronize my experience: figuration and abstraction are not separate artistic styles but rather part of a cyclical process through which we understand the world. Relative to concrete imagery, each point in the painting is a fundamental element—abstract and devoid of inherent meaning. Yet, in contrast to the vast unknown—whether emerging, dissolving, connecting, or standing alone—it becomes tangible and specific, something certain and concrete. Similarly, the moments experienced by the figures in my paintings, though brief, are vivid and rich with human emotion, worthy of being remembered. At the same time, it is their emotions, will, and actions that are writing not only the present but also history and the future. —Li Daiyun

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