Dai Guangyu

Dai Guangyu was born in Chengdu in November 1955. He currently lives and works in Chengdu.

Dai was born in a scholarly family and received training in calligraphy, painting and literature since childhood. He is a poet, author, painter, performance artist, and curator, a rare instance of a contemporary artist who combines exhibition planning with cultural criticism.

As early as the 1985 Art New Wave period, Dai Guangyu was one of the initiators and organizers of Southwest avant-garde art. The Sichuan Youth Red, Yellow and Blue Modern Painting Exhibition held by Dai and his friends at the Sichuan Provincial Art Museum in 1986 was the first truly modern art exhibition in Chengdu. n Provincial Art Museum, was the first truly modern art exhibition in Chengdu.

In February 1989, he participated in the Chinese Modern Art Exhibition held by the National Art Museum of China. In 1992, his participating work Mr. Shi Tao in the Study won the Excellence Award at the First Chinese Art Biennale of the 1990s curated by the art historian Lu Peng. In 1996, Dai won the Excellence Award China! China! Exhibition held by the Museum of Modern Art in Bonn, Germany.

The exhibited multi-media tryptic artwork Landscape on the Wall was compiled into Art of the 20th Century by Taschen Publishing House (1998, Cologn). From April to May 1994, invited by the United States Information Agency (USIA) International Visitors Program, Dai went to the United States for an academic visit and visited art institutions in six cities, including museums such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Moma Museum of Modern Art, and PS1.

Beginning with first Keepers of the Water (1995) performance art event, Dai Guangyu began mobilizing and organizing artists, critics, media, and audiences in Chengdu and across China in holding dozens of contemporary art events in Chengdu. For a time in the mid-1990s, Chengdu became the center of Chinese contemporary art.

With the turn of the 21st century, Dai Guangyu has continued to integrate Western contemporary art with traditional Chinese ink-wash painting, also focusing his work on appreciating the spiritual context of cultural origins, striving to obtain inspiration from art historical research into the evolution of ideas.

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Geographies of Feeling Art Exhibition Site

接下来，我们将着眼于本次展览的第二个地理维度，即文化地理， 我们认为文化地理学是人文地理学的重要组成部分，而我们关注的第一个地理维度–自然地理学–纯粹关注的是空间，这第二个维度不仅关注空间的同步研究，还关注情景文化在时间上的非同步发展。

自然地理和文化地理的一个重要相似之处在于，它们都是以物质为基础的认知领域， 也就是说这些领域的知识客观存在于物质世界之中。 自然地理学研究个体和群体活动的物质场所和空间，而文化地理学研究的则是在个体与群体的互动中所产生的语言、习俗、话语、知识、经济、政府和教育等现象。

文化只能基于时间变迁或者说通过比较两个互动时刻才能得以研究，因而从根本上说文化是具有历史性的。 鉴于此，我们从历史维度研究展览中视为艺术家的作品。

Su Shi said that there is poetry in Wang Wei’s paintings and painting in his poetry. This is not a false statement. However, what I aimed for in this painting is not only an artistic conception of a certain poem. I also wanted to excavate many layers of sense from the natural environment. The environment inculcated Wang Wei’s poetic sensibility, melding with his aesthetic spirit so that his mind could connect with the imagery, purifying his mind in the act of writing, transcending the ordinary world of thought. Exactly, it is no longer an isolated fact that Wangchuan, the location of Wang Wei’s secluded villa in the mountains, was featured in many of his poems, celebrated by those who came after him. Like the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming, “Picking chrysanthemums beneath the east fence. Carefree I see the south hills”, the idyllic idea-image of poetry is not only embodied in verse but resounds with passionate appeal. Therefore, “Wangchuan”, as an attribute of thought, has transcended the geographical concept of Wangchuan, and has advanced from the Wangchuan identified by the map and the Wangchuan inhabited by humans into dimensions of thought, aesthetics, and philosophy. This is a wonderful and promising realm of thought, perhaps a holy realm. How can it be generalized?

However, in the repeated explorations of the conceptualization of this site and idea-image, it seems that Wangchuan is being searched for in a dream, tossed and turned, and yet there seems to be a path to follow. The reality is that the geographically located Wangchuan has long since disappeared, not to mention the conceptual Wangchuan, as have both Wang Wei and Wang Wei’s thinking. People do not know “Wangchuan,” let alone need the “Wangchuan” shaped by poetry. The clarity and contemplation of the “The empty mountain is peaceful. Moonlight on the water ripples. ” (Nalan Xingde, Qing Dynasty) is not what modern people want. I read in a Japanese scholar’s monograph that Wangchuan was transformed by a social enterprise during reform at the end of the Cultural Revolution into a broken pond with no pine forests or lakes in sight. I am saddened that my spiritual place has been destroyed! Ideas have nothing to rely on in the world, which the uplifted soul finds oppressive. Once again, the spirit of “Wangchuan” is a symbol of thought, isn’t it? Therefore, when I paint Wangchuan, I give it a different power, to testify in a different direction, pointing towards, for example, the ecological environment (not just the humanistic environment at the level of thought). Now, the real Wangchuan can no longer be painted with the spiritual care of Wang Wei’s poem. I felt it would be a promising idea to transcend geography and use the German landscape as my model, a stand in for the old Wangchuan, so I selected the Bavarian Chiemsee, evoking “Wangchuan” scenery as if in a dream. This is more in line with the ideological quality of transcendental significance, isn’t it? I named this painting “Wang Wei’s Villa” to appropriately express the pain in my heart, and the sorrow that I feel for the loss of the true meaning of Wangchuan, the site of Wang Wei’s former home.

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Text：Dr. Sophia Kidd

The ‘mother’ is a main figure in our life. Aside from being what Carl Jung writes of as an ‘archetype,’ she is a main living influence upon our body, mind, soul, and spirit. Our mother is the first being with whom we come into contact, and the first space within which we reside. Our earliest affective geography was mapped along the inside of our mother’s belly, and the physiological make up of our moods derived from the foods she ate and beverages she consumed. In the womb our mother’s emotions exposed us to either dopamine or cortisol, and once we were outside of her body as a small child, her emotional behaviors taught us how to respond to danger and pleasure. Many of us will never rewire beyond these initial physiological, emotional, and behavioral impulses. We may not understand what we feel, why we feel this way, or even if we wanted to feel differently, how to do it.

In this artwork, Dai Guangyu is not so much contemplating the role of mother in our lives, as he is dwelling nostalgically, honoring the memory of his mother. We read in the essay he has recently written on this artwork about the conditions in which this memory of his mother arose. In this 2023 essay,  “Revisiting ‘My Mother’”《再谈<我的母亲>》, the artist approaches his artwork from a cultural geographical point of view, speaking of the situational elements out of which his painting arose, elements which are specific to this region of Sichuan, China, where as a young boy, he grew into a man.

The artist, however, has performed an additional function upon this memory, that of fragmentation and reassembling. This act of violence, of cutting a whole into many small pieces, speaks to how our memories, once whole, can become fragmented before we reassemble them, or before they are reassembled for us. Reassembling can be seen as a mode of re-cognition, that is, as a mode of understanding something in new ways. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their philosophical masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus, write of ‘de-territorialization’ and ‘re-territorialization.’ These methods of re-cognizing our world can be performed against our physiological, emotional, and behavioral impulses. We can pull apart our cognition, and ‘re-cognize,’ re-think, or re-wire our own identity. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to move far away from the land you grew up in. Dai Guangyu did this in 2004, relocating to Beijing, before moving even further afield, to Germany. He has since returned to Sichuan, residing on Mt. Qingcheng.

Dai Guangyu during the drawing of My Mother

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