Dai Ying’s first exhibition in Japan introduces her evolving artistic practice to a new audience. Based between Beijing and New York, she has developed a body of work grounded in repetition, layered materials, and cyclical structures, which resonate with East Asian aesthetic and philosophical traditions while engaging a contemporary global context.

The works on view reflect her long-term engagement with calligraphy, ritualized gesture, and the accumulation of time through material processes. Spiral forms, layered pigments, and gestural lines trace flows of energy and cycles of life, creating surfaces that unfold gradually, inviting viewers into a field of sensation rather than a fixed image.

Origins & Personal History

Artist in Studio

- How did art first enter your life?

Dai: Art did not initially enter my life under the name of “art.” It functioned more like a natural language between the body and the world. I grew up in Southwest China, in an environment deeply infused with nature, primal human culture, and religious sensibility. From a very early age, writing, line, rhythm, the cosmos, all living beings, and spiritual connection were already part of everyday life.

Calligraphy, as a discipline of both body and spirit, allowed me to realize that a line is never static—it is breath, pause, time, space, and the trace of both body and consciousness.

At that stage, art did not mean self-expression. Rather, it was an inherited and regulated order, something memorized and embodied through physical and spiritual awareness. It was precisely this early experience that later allowed me, when encountering contemporary art, not to see “tradition” as something to escape from, but as a source of energy that can be continuously reactivated.

- When did you begin to consider art as a possible path for yourself?

Dai: Viewing art as a “life path” was not a sudden decision, but a process that gradually became clear. Through systematic artistic training in my early years, followed by the construction of an art-historical perspective and continuous practice in artistic creation, I came to realize that art is not merely a skill or a style. It is a way of thinking about the world, questioning structures, and situating one’s own existence.

The more decisive turning point occurred when I began to understand what it meant to exist as a woman artist. At that moment, I felt that art could not only carry personal experience, but also respond to established social orders. Art was no longer about what I could do, but what I had to do. From that point on, art ceased to be a career choice and became an unavoidable direction of life.

Japan Exhibition

Artist in Studio

- This is your first exhibition in Japan. How did you approach preparing for it?

Dai: I did not treat this exhibition simply as an opportunity to “enter Japan,” but rather as a spiritual encounter. For me, Japan is not a foreign culture. In terms of aesthetics, bodily awareness, and the understanding of rituality and repetition, it resonates deeply with the Eastern philosophies I have long engaged with.

During the preparation process, my focus was not on how Japanese audiences might interpret my work, but on whether my works honestly responded to my own internal trajectory, the era I inhabit, and my bodily experience. I deliberately slowed down the rhythm of creation, allowing the works to grow organically rather than producing them for the sake of exhibition. In this sense, the preparation was an inward process rather than an outward adaptation or response.

- Could you tell us about the new works you prepared for this exhibition?

Dai: The new works in this exhibition continue my ongoing research into Geo-Maternal, but they are structurally and emotionally deeper and heavier. The solemnity of rituality and the eruption of profound energies become more pronounced, oscillating and merging between restraint and irrepressibility.

In terms of materials, I continue to work with xuan paper, multi-layered staining, overlapping materials, and repetitive hand-drawn processes, maintaining an awareness of subjectivity rooted in being human. For me, these works function both as declarations and as breathing entities—they are extensions of bodily and spiritual consciousness, and at the same time, a resolute response to the world.

Making of process

- Your works are shown alongside selected works by Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka. While their practices emerged from different historical and social conditions, your own work engages with feminism, the role of women, and questions of identity. Do you sense any shared questions or tensions that resonate across these different experiences?

Dai: I approach such juxtaposed exhibitions with deep caution and respect. The historical, institutional, and social conditions that Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka confronted are different from those of my own time. Yet I do sense a profound resonance—a shared experience of how women, within highly structured worlds, use art to claim space for their existence and to speak to the world.

In their works, there is a persistent gaze toward the body, repetition, energy, and the world itself. My own practice, though arising from a different cultural background, similarly asks: when women are no longer merely objects to be viewed or defined, but become generators of energy and structure, how can art unfold? For me, this tension across time is not a matter of comparison, but a form of spiritual dialogue.

- What would you like Japanese viewers to take away from this exhibition?

Dai: I do not expect viewers to “understand” my work. Rather, I hope that while encountering the works, they might open a psychological space within themselves that has not yet been perceived or activated. I hope they become aware of their own breathing and bodily position, set aside visually dominant perception and analytical thinking, and instead use mind-consciousness to sense the infinite expansion of energy and the boundless growth of life—to feel the deepest whispers and primal forces of the universe and the earth.

If viewers can momentarily step away from judgment and the pursuit of meaning, and enter a more open state of perception, that is already enough for me. Art does not necessarily need to provide answers; it can offer a question, leaving each person to seek their own answer.

Global Reception & Identity

Artist in Studio

- You have lived and worked in different cultural contexts. How has this experience shaped the way you think about your work today?

Dai: Living for extended periods within different cultural contexts has made me increasingly aware that identity is not a fixed label, yet it remains an inescapable source. It is both a continuously fluid state and something rooted as deeply as the earth itself—almost genetic in nature.

This coexistence of fluidity and rootedness keeps me vigilant toward any single narrative, and reinforces my belief that artistic language exists beyond all spoken languages as a universal language of the world. It is capable of breaking through linguistic systems and communicative barriers, and stands as something profound and irreplaceable.

Future Projects & Philosophical Reflections

Artist in Studio

- Looking ahead, what themes or questions do you feel drawn to explore next?

Dai: Looking ahead, I will continue to explore the significance of human subjectivity, while focusing on how humanity can preserve autonomy and self-awareness in an era of digital intelligence—without being dissolved by machines and artificial systems. I am particularly drawn to those aspects that cannot be calculated or replaced: bodily experience, the flow of energy, and life’s own primal capacities.

My continued research into Geo-Maternal provides an essential conceptual framework for these questions. It emphasizes the origins of life, relationality, and cyclical continuity, while opening infinite possibilities for the future. As a result, my work does not attempt to project a predetermined vision of the future, but instead allows space for works to grow freely.

- After experiencing this exhibition, is there one question you would like viewers to carry with them?

Dai:

Where am I?

Does life exist?

Are we still alive?

Artist in Studio

DAI YING：Lines of Infinity