David Diao

David Diao is a Chinese-American artist born in 1943 in Chengdu, China. After a brief stay in Hong Kong, he settled in New York City with his father in 1955. During the early 1960s, Diao worked for galleries and institutions such as the Guggenheim and the Kootz Gallery while delving into the New York School of abstract painting.

After creating virtually monochrome canvases between 1966-68, Diao turned his attention to the relationship between the surface and its support structure. Emphasising the materiality of his work by highlighting the presence of the stretcher frame or bricks that would be placed beneath the canvas. Per Emily Wasserman, writing in 1969, “in the paintings which he has made since the summer of 1967 Diao has been occupied with surface and its light-reflecting properties which are played up through loose, though somewhat systematised all-over gesturing and an extremely subdued, modulated range of neutral colours.”[1]

Diao’s first show of abstract minimalism, which received critical acclaim, was held in 1969 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Waddington’s is honoured to offer one of Diao’s esteemed 1969 works on canvas, Boxcar. In the artist’s own words, Diao describes the process and inspiration behind the creation of this monumental work in a November 2024 interview with art historian and curator, Ihor Holubizky.

“Boxcar is one of the paintings that has vertical lines formed by the canvas touching and rubbing against 3 vertical stretcher braces bevelled to an edge as I painted on the face of the canvas.

The stretched canvas is on blocks leaning against the wall. I would load a sponge with paint and move laterally across the surface, first in one direction, then the opposite, until the entire surface is covered with paint.

Often there would be several colours working wet into wet. In this case, there was just the brown paint. Each pass of the sponge also caused the nap of the cloth to go in that direction, then the return has the nap reverse direction.

Then I took a tube of yellow paint and squeezed it directly on the canvas in horizontal streaks, reinforcing the edge between the brown strokes. The yellow streaks reminded me of what it might look like from inside the dark interior of a train boxcar with sunlight outside coming through the slats, hence the title. This is one of 2 paintings that I squeezed paint directly from the tube. The other is Scarface, 1969, in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”[2]

[1] Emily Wasserman. “Allan Hacklin, David Diao, Donald Kaufman.” Artforum, Summer 1969. Accessed October 11, 2023. https://www.artforum.com/features/allan-hacklin-david-diao-donald-kaufman-210758/.

[2] Ihor Holubizky and David Diao, “David Diao, Boxcar, 1969”, November 2024.