David Diao
b. 1943, Chengdu, China
Odd Man Out, 1974
Acrylic on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Over a prolific career spanning five decades, David Diao critically explores key tenets of modernism in painting. Engaging with canonical motifs in the history of abstraction, his work destabilizes the formalist tradition that underpins this history with a focus on biography and social issues underlying the politics of institutional and canonical inclusion.

His early painting Odd Man Out, obliquely referencing a film and novel of the same name, breaks with the convention of titling abstract paintings “Untitled,” a prevailing drill to sanitize art’s context at the time. Diao extends this critique in his later work to address history and personal experience, such as Imperiled, where the title is rendered in faux calligraphic strokes à la the Chop Suey font on a yellow backdrop, powerfully situating the painting within the social context of appropriation, discrimination, and institutional exclusion that continues to mold Asian American artistic experiences.

“I have sought to question that abstract painting has no referent other than itself,” Diao notes, adding “almost all my work has a backstory.”