Whitestone Gallery Beijing is pleased to announce The Field of Life and Death, a solo exhibition by artist Dai Ying, on view from June 13 to July 18, 2026. Bringing together a total of 18 paintings, the exhibition will feature works from the artist’s Geo-Maternal, Goddess, and M-Theory series, alongside oil paintings and her latest Facing Gaia series. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 13, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., the artist and the curator will also be present on site.

Exhibition Article

The Field of Life and Death
By Bao Dong (Independent Critic & Curator)
About sixteen or seventeen years ago, Dai Ying began creating works using Xuan paper and pigments. Paper is fragile, almost weightless. Layer upon layer, pigment seeps into its fibers, then seeps again, accumulating through repeated acts of staining and absorption.

She painted spirals—circular, elliptical forms that seemed to expand endlessly across the surface. Cells? Embryos? Vulvae? Breasts? Looking at these spirals, I am reminded of something. Contemporary physicists suggest that at the deepest and smallest level of reality there are not particles, but vibrating strings. These strings are unimaginably fine, oscillating beyond the limits of perception. Different vibrations give rise to different forms: one becomes light, another stone, another living beings like ourselves. This is what they call Superstring Theory.

The name may sound abstract, but it points toward a simple intuition: everything is fundamentally connected.

The spirals in Dai Ying’s paintings seem to embody this same principle. They rotate, vibrate, and radiate outward across the paper. They never appear static. Instead, they feel alive—breathing, expanding, becoming.

Among the works presented in this exhibition is a series titled Geo-Maternal. “Geo” refers to the earth; “Maternal” to the mother. In traditional Chinese cosmology, Heaven is masculine and Earth is feminine. All things emerge from the earth, and all things eventually return to it.

Embedded within these works is another symbol: the ancient Egyptian Ankh, a loop joined to a cross. For the Egyptians, it was the key of life. The dead carried it as a passage through one realm into another. Life and death coexist within this simple form.

Dai Ying incorporates the Ankh into her Geo-Maternal series, where it emerges unexpectedly from dense strata of color and matter. The Ankh itself is composed from powdered obsidian— material excavated from Paleolithic sites tens of thousands of years old. Obsidian was once shaped into tools, weapons, and sacrificial instruments by the Shang people and Mayans. Within the womb of the Earth Mother, the gate of birth and the gate of death reveal themselves to be the same threshold.

In her recent paintings, Dai Ying has abandoned the brush altogether.

She paints with her hands.

Her fingers, palms, and skin are immersed directly into mineral pigments and powdered stone. Ochres, blacks, greens—earth-derived materials carrying the scent of soil and rock. The marks left on the canvas resemble scratches, clawings, traces of physical encounter. They evoke a much earlier moment in human history, when people mixed mineral powders with animal fat and applied them directly onto cave walls.

Those prehistoric images—bison, deer, hunters—remain after thousands, even tens of thousands of years. Their surfaces are rough, dark, and red. In placing her hand directly upon the canvas, Dai Ying seems to reconnect with those first image-makers.

This body of work is titled Facing Gaia.

Gaia is the Greek name for what Chinese culture calls the Earth Mother. East and West may employ different vocabularies, but both point toward the same intuition: a vast maternal force that sustains, generates, and carries life. This maternal principle is not gentle or sentimental. It is ancient, powerful, and older than humanity itself.

Today, discussions surrounding women and femininity are everywhere. Some become ideological slogans, abstracted into distant theoretical positions. Others are transformed into carefully curated lifestyles, layered with aesthetic filters and commercial aspirations. Although these approaches appear opposed, both often drift away from lived experience.

Dai Ying does neither.

She does not produce slogans. She does not perform identity.

Her hands enter directly into the pigment. The pain she speaks of is pain that has been lived. Rather than offering positions or prescriptions, she places before us the material residue of experience: the pain of childbirth, the emptiness left by a father’s death, the ruins of demolished homes, abandoned objects without names, and the traces of a hand pressed against a surface.

These things possess weight.

They are not symbolic gestures. They are the weight of a woman living in the world—remembering, enduring, making, and continuing.

This brings to mind the writer Xiao Hong.

In The Field of Life and Death, Xiao Hong wrote of rural women’s births, deaths, childbirth, and erasure. What gives the work its enduring force is its directness. Blood remains blood. Pain remains pain. Nothing stands between experience and expression.

Dai Ying pursues a similar task.

One works through language; the other through pigment and touch.

The lesson is simple: one does not need to ascend into abstraction. One begins from what has been lived. What hurts may be spoken. What is remembered may be preserved. What remains unseen may be made visible.

Perhaps this is what Xiao Hong ultimately passed on to those who came after her.

And perhaps this is where the value of such work resides today.

Human beings, like animals, remain occupied with living and dying. Yet something always remains.

There is an instinctive force within Dai Ying’s practice.

At times it emerges through meditation: a state of stillness so profound that one seems able to hear the pulse within the body and the movement of water beneath the earth. Works produced from this condition feel dense, contained, and sedimented, like stones resting at the bottom of a deep pool.

At other times the force appears as ecstasy—wild, untamed, animal. Pigment is thrown, hands strike the surface, and the canvas becomes covered with traces of tearing and struggle.

These two conditions—stillness and ferocity, contemplation and instinct—are not opposites. They coexist.

One moves toward the deepest place.

The other runs toward the wildest.

And at the furthest reaches of both, they arrive at the same source:

a force older than humanity itself, rising continuously from beneath the earth.