Artists

When we married, I accompanied Dai Dai home to pay respects to his parents who live in a traditional and intricate wood carved Jiangnan style home. It’s wooden floorboards and stairs made squeaking and creaking noises when we walked upon them. Across the street, a small two-story storefront was also made of wood, its sloping and rounded eaves hung low. Dai Dai told me that when he was young, although the road to school was not far, he still had to cross three or four bridges. The roadside was lined with burgeoning birch trees and ginkgo trees, and when their white ginkgo nuts would fall to the ground the children would rush to collect them - these was the happiest memories of his youth. When Dai Dai was in elementary school, he was sent to Shanghai to become the famed Yan Wen Liang’s last protégé. In 1980, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts was recruiting students in Shanghai;
from that moment on he started his life in the North. In 1988, he graduated with Li Gui Jun and Liu Xiao Dong and remained at the academy to teach. He started working in sculpture in 2003 while on a sabbatical, he thought it was great fun, everywhere he went he would be molding palm-sized sculptures, despite their crudeness there were always uncanny resemblances. Later, he began to make little nudes that were also extraordinary despite their roughness. I think that Dai Dai found his true love in sculpture, for he has eternally been searching for that mood, that atmosphere steeped in a reserved oriental essence.