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.

Artworks