David Diao: Work 1969-2005

Who puts smiley faces over Warhol-esque silkscreens of Bruce Lee in full howling attack? Who superimposes loungey, gentlemanly, portraits of himself over Jackson Pollock's canvases, as if to take blasa responsibility for their drips? And who makes a tryptich in which Lee and Pollock face off? While we're at it, who puts a black Saint George's cross on a red flag? David Diao, whose artistic life "began thirty years ago very much under the influence of Greenbergian formalism." Diao has since wrestled and mastered twin artistic and racial dragons many times over. Of his MoMa series he says, "...here I stand, a real slanted-eye Asian, desiring however ambivalently to be in the MoMA... in any case I don't mind poking fun at myself at the same time. I am there, smack in the center of the muck."