Critique for In Memory of Forgotten (2020)

For us, the past lives in either memory or history. If we say history is written, then memory is fluid. The fluid memory contains the energy of the life entity. Therefore, we can say that a living entity acts in a given way because it remembers previous events." In a sense, events see the intersection between history and memory, and the world we live in is made up of events.

The present, including everything at the present, is a new causal chain, one leading to the past, and the other to the future. On the contrary, the present connecting both ends is uncertain. Uncertainty means breaking the sense of stability brought by this secular time image of repetition. In fact, Dai Ying chose the career of art against the will of her parents, and this more or less shows a kind of uncertainty. When she started to make paintings at Heiqiao Studio on her own, the relationship between art and artist is as satisfied as her paintings show. The painting is clean and clear, but crazy like a machine. It is grander and bolder... really meaningless. In a self-statement, Dai Ying cited the well-known conceptual artist Sol LeWitt in his letter to his female artist friend Eva Hesse: “Forget about being cool or not; create your own world. You must try to be dumb, feign deaf and dumb, and empty your mind completely. Then it is possible to do this."

Without a doubt, that small studio as well as the blank world on the paper and canvas is Dai Ying's world. There, she endows herself with an identity — artist. The creative practice by an artist is a process of self-realization. Dai Ying is bound to perceive pain and anxiety in the process. This may be the reason that she likes LeWitt's letter. While being motivated, we can see this letter's inspiration for her painting practice from Dai Ying's paintings. Compared to the grammatical idea of formalism, Dai Ying's paintings are closer to a form of energy. A direct, rich and diffusive sense are the visual features of her paintings. By contrast, the sense of order in the painting is a paradox, like a halo or the eyespot on the wings of a butterfly and moth, leading the viewers to the vertiginous infinity.

For Dai Ying, repetition is endowed with spiritual dimension — the combination of physical rite and painting practice. However it cannot be described as conventional Oriental nature. From a given perspective, Dai Ying joined the art world to cut the time in her life. In general, more time in life will make us calm, but as doers in the art world, they always feel the urgency of time because of external factors. It seems to be contradictory, but this is modern life. The moment is seized so as not to forget ourselves in the passage of time. However, what is self? Following a host of events that followed, such as the forced dismantling of Heiqiao Studio, the sudden death of her loving father, and the resulting emotional and psychological turmoil compel Dai Ying to face another aspect of life. For Dai Ying, the ruination of the studio and the death of her father (protector) mean that the former rhythm of life is gone forever, and only memory remains, even if the sun rises every day. Memory is inevitable, because if there is no power of memory, Dai Ying's consciousness would disintegrate. However as Maurice Halbwachs put it, individual memory of each is a lookout for the collective memory. This is not enough for Dai Ying. Like an ancient person, she unconsciously puts her memory of her father in a ritualized scenario.

The ruins — or the place to be built — the construction sector that his father was engaged in was changed into a spiritual exercise by Dai Ying in the form of imagery. This is different from nostalgia in Chinese traditions and also different from Marcel Proust's capture of the fleeting past. Dai Ying's self begins to show a socialized plural image, an identity with an empathy mechanism. As mentioned above, Dai Ying's installations are monumental buildings. The three-color cloth, idle machine tools, and old plastic bags symbolize the image of the victims. Historical violence and violent history overlap in the realization of the past. As memorials are always launched by survivors, how to transform a memorial into a kind of oblivion still requires the present of the future. Obviously, for Dai Ying, the pain of losing her father is not a psychological trauma, because her artistic behavior shows that Dai Ying's previous cultural modeling and self are reconnected again. This may be construed as a kind of rebirth. However, Dai Ying hopes to sing the happy birthday song for rebirth with those considered the inferior through the scenarios presented in her work “The Internationale” — returning to the eternal utopia of humankind. However, it at least enables us to keep a distance from nihilism.

—— Sun Dong Dong, Curator for In Memory of Forgotten