LI DAIYUN

Li Daiyun is a realist painter who approaches her art in a methodical, disciplined manner that reflects the structure of her family’s history of life in Communist China. She delves into the relationship between people and social forms, as well as the impact and psychological projection of different natural or political environments on human living conditions.

Considering the past several decades of China’s history—from its founding to the present—Li views them to have been marked by immense upheaval and rapid transformation, like a condensed example of human history itself. Captured through images, these moments become countless slices that can be examined from multiple perspectives—human nature, social structures, belief systems, and more, seeing the drama, subversion, and absurdity as endless.

This series of paintings was inspired by everyday moments in the lives of her grandparents’ and parents’ generations during the 1950s and 1960s—a brief period when a new order and a new belief system had just been established, and everything was still colored by immense faith and hope. The madness and collapse of the deification movement, along with the endless lies and hypnosis used like a haze to sustain a godlike idol, still seemed far away.

Just like the undeniably globalized era in which she created these works, where pandemics, wars, movements—under various banners—and the shifting tides of world politics also seemed distant.