David DiaoDa Hen Li House

Aresti Cervera gallery is honoured to present an exhibition by David Diao.

David Diao left his home in China, in exceptional circumstances, 76 years ago, when the Communist regime came to power. The property was expropriated and later housed the offices of the Sichuan Daily. When he returned for the first time, thirty years later, the house had been demolished. For years, Diao has sought to capture in a body of paintings his feelings of mourning over this loss. He finally presented the outcome of this experience in his first solo exhibition in China, held in 2008 at the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing.

Philip Tinari writes in his essay on the Da Hen Li House project:

“Drawing on his own memories and those of his many uncles and aunts, and guided by the fixed measurements of a tennis court, the distinctive feature of his house, he established a link between that earlier reality and his present life. In the resulting canvases there are subtle references to different interwoven languages: architecture, painting, Chinese ideograms. These paintings are also about an attempt to reconstruct the past through the imagination. With this intrinsically futile act of trying to recover a past space and time, Diao transposes his characteristic pictorial wit and skepticism into a new context of historical pathos.”

This work is so important to Diao that he went on to make a second complete version of the series, which was shown at UCCA (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) in Beijing in 2015 and later at M+ in Hong Kong in 2023.

David Diao (b. 1943, Chengdu, China) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Galería Marta Cervera (2026); Greene Naftali, New York (2025, 2023); Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio (2017); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2014); and The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut (2014).

Notable group exhibitions include those held at the Brooklyn Museum (2024); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum (2023); M+, Hong Kong (2021); Le Consortium, Dijon (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

David Diao’s work is held in the collections of institutions including The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Le Consortium, Dijon; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; Fonds régional d’art contemporain, Brittany, France; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; M+ Collection, Hong Kong; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.