Dai Ying: Transcendent Engagement By Richard Vine
The widely diverse works of midcareer Chinese artist Dai Ying—abstract paintings, large-scale installations, videos, and intense live performances—are unified by her highly personalized spirituality. Though currently living a globalized life in Beijing, New York, and Los Angeles, Dai was born in 1983 in the remote village of Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province. The nearby Mount Emei is the tallest of the Four Sacred Mountains revered in the China’s Buddhist tradition. The village, which is surrounded by multiple temples, provides services to tourists, many of whom make the pilgrimage-like trek to the Golden Summit topped by a 48-meter (147-foot) statue of site’s patron bodhisattva, Samantabhadra (known as Pǔxián Púsà in Chinese), whose name means “All Good,” “Universally Worthy,” or “All Auspicious.” Endowed with multiple faces and seated on four elephants facing in four different directions, the figure represents an enlightened being who authored the Lotus Sutra (which details the means to salvation) and took the Ten Great Vows of Buddhism, notably stressing the covenants that endorsed his own spiritual path: remaining in the world to aid those who are not yet enlightened, rather than privately transcending into Nirvana through pure contemplation.
For Dai, the influence of this environment—“a place believed to be closest to the sky,” “a massive, natural energy field”—was more mystical than doctrinaire. As she elaborated in a May 20, 2024, Fused interview:
From the moment I was born from my mother’s womb to the world, the energy of my hometown, Mount E’mei, has completely integrated into my blood, influencing my life. . . . The water and soil nurtured me and made me a person with a naturally vibrant and strong energy. In my artworks, whether it’s easel painting, installation, or performance art, the energy of Mount E’mei naturally infuses into my practice.
Since leaving home to attend college, Dai has always kept with her a container of soil from her hometown, a reminder—visual, tactile, olfactory—of her origin. As she told Artron.net on the occasion of her performance “No Dust to be Wiped”(2023), this talisman is emblematic of a larger belief tying all human life directly to the soil that sustains us:
The earth is our mother, no one can live without the earth, and we will eventually end up in the soil, and our life is also nourished by the soil. Earth is the most basic substance in our life, the mother’s womb, like the mother’s strength, it contains everything and accepts everything.
Historically, soil has great symbolic import in China, which boasts about 400 distinct types. In Zhongshan Park, beside the Forbidden City in Beijing, one can find the Altar of Land and Grain, also known as the Five-Soil Altar, where many successive emperors conducted offerings for the sake of agricultural plenty. The altar incorporates a platform with yellow dirt at its center, surrounded by soil beds of green, red, white, and black, corresponding to the four cardinal directions.
Dai’s earthy universalist conviction, betokened by herMount Emei soil sample, has sustained her though worldwide travels and equally wide-ranging personal experiences. At age five, she began to learn ink painting, poetry, and calligraphy, eventually gaining the ability to read ancient texts written in classical Chinese characters. Later, she undertook “impractical” studies at the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University and the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Beijing. The years 2011-17 she spent in New York, absorbing the city’s multiculturalism and artistic fervor. While in New York she not only made and exhibited her own work, but also served as a board member of the Asian Art Funds foundation, and didresearch in Chinese ink art for the World Art Center. Subsequently, in Beijing, she has founded the Vis Art Center, specializing in contemporary art exhibitions, and serves as brand manager of Vis Art Maimai, which develops and promotes art spaces. Through all these activities and more, she pursues self-realization as a wife and mother, a spiritual seeker, a human rights advocate, and an international artist.
Dai has vividly literalized her earth-centered conviction in her performances. A video supplementing her “No Dust to be Wiped” exhibition documents a diverse range of people from all over China, many of them children, each collecting a local soil sample and speaking about its meaning to them. One hundred and eight of these variously shaped and sized containers were then arranged in concentric circles on a thick rectilinear carpet of Beijing dirt, presided over by a large golden wall disk, at Huguo Guanyin Temple, which situated on the main axis of Beijing. Guanyin is the popular “goddess”—technically, theBuddhist bodhisattva—of mercy and compassion, sometimes compared to the Virgin Mary in the West. In numerology, 108 has a multitude of significations that collectively suggest the unitary wholeness of all existence. The show’s title was derived from a verse by the Tang Dynasty monk and poet Fenggan: “Actually there isn't a thing / Much less any dust to wipe away.” Evoking of the ultimate emptiness, or “void,” of Being, this poetic epigram essentially reiterates the lines proffered by Huineng, an illiterate 7th-century temple laborer, when hecompeted successfully to become the sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism. Huineng’s poem asserts that there is no need to constantly clean the mirror-like human mind through spiritual discipline, as his studious-monk rival had claimed. Instead, the ultimate Truth is revealed whole and at once to those who truly awaken.
In her ritualistic solo performance, which was videotaped, Dai moved slowly and silently about the consecrated space in bare feet as visitors watched. Occasionally, she would raise a container to her forehead or above her head in a gesture of mute blessing, or kneel to distribute some of the provincial soil on the Beijing earth at her feet. The artist’s most quietly drama act was to grasp handfuls of soil and pour them over her own head, in a kind of gritty self-baptism—much as a Buddhist monk repeatedly bows and chants or a Catholic priest performs Mass,as a stand-in for all believers.
Dai presented a starker version of this action the same year at the Guo Yun Lou Art Center in Suzhou. The galleries there occupy part of a house belonging to the 19th-century government official Gu Wenbin, who collected rare books and constructed one of the last, and most stylistically eclectic, of Suzhou’s famous pleasure gardens. In “Suddenly Moon White,” the black-clad Dai—her face looking grief-stricken—walked, knelt, and sat in a large rectangle of damp Suzhou earth beneath a reddish wall disk. At times, she crumpled the dirt above her head, smeared it on her face, or dug and pulled at it, as if trying to bury herself. To a Western eye, this recalls the Christian “dark night of the soul,” a period of doubt through which one passes on the way to redemption. Being washed in the mud, so to speak, evokes the fundamentalist call to be “washed in the Blood of the Lamb”—to accept one’s salvation through the sacrificial crucifixion of Christ.
Only the work’s title softens the impact of what looked like an acting out of psychological trauma. “Suddenly moon white” is a phrase that comes at the end of a Song Dynasty poem by Zhang Yu, contemplating night in a garden. The white light of the moon, falling on vegetation, was traditionally seen by the literati as a very pale blue, the hue adopted for their sacrificial robes by the Qing emperors. Dai has described herself as being enchanted by Gu Wenbin’s garden—a walled refuge that plays with forced perspectives, anachronistic juxtapositions of architectural elements, and a mingling of widely diverse trees and plants—and so performing at the Center in a virtual trance.This complete absorption in her spiritual task was earlier demonstrated in the performance she carried out during her 2015 “Magic Cube” exhibition at Art Fusion in New York, where she wrote out the Heart Sutra (which advocates direct apprehension of the Absolute) on a canvas on the gallery floor, unperturbed by visitors shuffling and chatting around her.
Dai’s abstract paintings are, for the most part, a muchbrighter affair, often bursting with energy and color. To be sure, there are a few grisaille compositions like the two “Walking Shaman” ink-on-paper triptychs from 2017, as well as M-Theory 15 (2017), M-Theory 25, and M-Theory 27 (both 2020), in which multiple wave-like lines and subtle modulations of density bespeak premeditated visual and emotional control. But the overall trajectory of Dai’s painting is from well-defined forms and muted hues toward ever more liberated shapes and increasingly luminous colors.
One of Dai’s first painting series, the aptly named “Sense of Propriety” (2015), features sparse fields of single-brushstroke rectangles and straight lines politely coexisting and chromatically echoing each other. From the same year, thesomewhat brighter “Magic Cube” images jumble multiple round-cornered rectangles inside larger round-cornered rectangles, while the “Chinese Magic Cube” suite offers various floating shapes containing concentric color rings, seemingly communicating at a distance like piebald cells. Thereafter, Dai’s“M-Theory” series (2015-ongoing) explodes with formal dynamism and vibrant color.
A key to the complex vitalism of those compositions lies in their collective title. M-theory is a species of advanced physics that posits a universe composed of vibrating open and closed subatomic strings (as opposed to traditional particles), yielding a reality of not three or four but 11 dimensions. Accordingly,Dai’s “M-Theory” works are rife with concentric rings, jockeying amoeba-like forms, wavering lines, crisscrossing vectors, and bright clashing hues, all imbued with the manic energy and allover simultaneity of the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once. The forms are often cropped by the edges of the canvas, implying that the work’s visual field may beinfinite.
Such expansive disruptiveness, though visually invigorating, seems inimical to the quiet mindfulness that Dai ultimately seeks. So it is not surprising that her “Wishful Pagoda” series (2023-ongoing) broadens the swirling forms and damps down the colors to a degree that bespeaks atmosphere, an optical reminder that our perception of the truth is always clouded by the imperfections of our senses and minds.
If her performances and her paintings are, respectively, the somber and joyful poles of Dai’s oeuvre, her installations are the charged field between them, integrating these emotive extremes into a complex Golden Mean. They are also the most concretely grounded of her artworks, firmly tethering her innate aestheticism and spirituality to everyday life. “In Memory of Forgotten,” Dai’s solo exhibition at the Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2020, gathered many of the most powerful examples. In the gallery’s interior, a life-sized sculptural figure, a body portrait of Dai herself, knelt completely doubled over and face-down on a large steel plate—a posture of complete supplication, grief, and reverence. But why was this obeisance made? Who or what had been wrongly “forgotten”? Only gradually, in light of the show’s other installations, did the answer become clear.
One entire wall was filled with the words—crudely handwritten in both English and Chinese—of “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” a 1795 song by Scottish Romantic poet Robert Burns. Composed in the era of the American and French revolutions, the lyrics assert the brotherhood and moral equality of all persons, regardless of their social station. Soaring nearly eight meters high was Attendance Record, a square hollow monolith woven from the tri-color plastic material used to fence off construction sites or hold the clothes and belongings of migrant workers. The artwork is larded with quotes attributed to philosophers and statesmen such as Plato, Nietzsche, Lenin, Napoleon, and the Han Dynasty emperor Liu Bang—thinkers whose ideas largely shape a world in which common workers, those whose daily attendance and hourly production are closely monitored, have little time or left-over energy for intellectual pursuits. (Intentionally or not, these alleged “quotations” are of the type that float around freely on the internet, without citation of specific texts, often in corrupted or totally fabricated form—a Cloud of Unknowing for the digital age.) Echoing this commemoration of the invisible was The Internationale, titled after the worldwide socialist anthem (“We are nothing / Let us be everything” is a typical line.) Over a pile of cheap, crumpled, brightly colored plastic bags—the kind we all use and throw away—the universally recognized Happy Birthday Song occasionally played, poignantly celebrating waste.
Such was the show’s reigning metaphor. Working men and women have long been treated as negligently, as disdainfully, as the down-scale materials they use. Thus in Look at Me! (its title equally a demand and a plea), discarded laser-cutting tools werestacked into jagged roughly two- to three-meter (6½-to-10-foot) columns illuminated from within by bare lightbulbs. In their darkened room, the stacks resembled both torture devices and high-rise building skeletons.
Two related installations are now on view through July 21 at the Cui Zhenkuan Art Museum in Xi’an. Home is a huge jumble of plastic bags, tricolor fabric, building debris, a crushed baby crib, birthday candles, work gloves, etc.—all pulled from demolition sites by Dai herself. Next to it, several Luoyang shovels—a vertical-extraction hand tool used by archeologists and grave robbers alike—lie on a heap of Xi’an soil. Thissecond work, A sod-turning ceremony, alludes to two themes. One is the centuries-long struggle between those whose who seek to preserve cultural artifacts for posterity and those who seek to exploit them for personal gain. (Which invites the question of how and why some people become so desperate that they resort to looting.) The other is an implicit commemoration of the myriad workmen, concubines, soldiers, and court officials who were buried alive in the royal tombs of Xi’an in order to serve Qin Shi Huang and later emperors in the afterlife.
The import of the “In Memory” works and the Xi’an installations is intensified when one learns that they were prompted by the long illness and 2018 death of Dai’s beloved father—a man who, beginning as a construction laborer,managed eventually to own and run his own building company.This hardworking but sensitive father encouraged his daughter’s childhood love of the refined arts of painting and calligraphy, a passion that lead to her current cosmopolitan life. Thus Temple, a room-sized pile of paper sheets shown in “In Memory,”conveyed a moral challenge as strong as its physical beauty. The extended sheets—the stuff of writing, printing, and traditional Chinese painting—were blank: silent about past injustices, susceptible to deterioration over time, but also mutely awaiting the world’s future inscriptions.
For Dai Ying, transcendental yearning is always inflected by engagement with the earthy, the daily, the real; yet even the most mundane reality, filled with the lowest routine labor, is itself always infused with a spiritual hope. That paradox is the creative genesis, and redemptive meaning, of all her art.
Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America and author of the historical survey New China, New Art.
