Dai Ying’s latest installation and performance at Art Central Hong Kong embodied the artist’s ongoing meditation on feminism, mysticism, and post-socialist thought.
Presented by Yiwei Gallery, Dai’s site-specific installation, Temple 2, transformed rice paper, cinnabar, and steel into a room-sized womb. Fairgoers were invited to enter and exit this primeval environment at will, one by one; on opening day, the artist herself emerged, blindfolded and gagged with gauze, for a viscerally raw performance entitled Red.
Born in Sichuan, China and currently dividing her time between New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing, Dai Ying (戴瑩) studied Chinese calligraphy and painting from the age of five and has maintained a full-time art practice since 2011. Her work spans installation, performance, sculpture, video, and painting.
Moving beyond traditional gender dilemmas, Dai proposes that women commit to the “construction of a Geomaternal spiritual matrix—breaking through binary oppositional logic to reconfigure societal energetic field through spiritual dimensions that surpass hormonal constraints.”
For Dai as for her second-wave feminist forerunners, the personal is inevitably political, as she seeks to establish a “dialectical dialogue fields across cultural contexts, where ancestral memories intersect with technocapitalist modernity to form multidirectional temporal-spatial configurations.”
These theoretical underpinnings are visible in Temple 2 and Red, as well as in Dai’s new sculptures and paintings also unveiled in Hong Kong.
Formed from such disparate materials as concrete and stained silk, Dai’s sculptural series titled The cold wind blows 2 (2025) evokes demolition sites, bodily trauma, and nature’s tender offshoots hanging in the balance.
