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photographer based in nyc (greenpoint, brooklyn)

Dai focuses on using photography to explore the intersection of queer and Asian-American identities.

Dai has worked on a project (Offered Tenderness), advised by photographer Danna Singer, where he travelled across the U.S. from Butte, Montana (where early Chinese miners and railroad workers migrated) to Hartford, Connecticut (where author Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous takes place), seeking remnants of his queer Asian identity in the country. The notion of migration in many Asian-American lives and the transformation many queer folk go through continues to be topical in his work today.

Dai works heavily with self-portraiture to investigate the notion of gay narcissism. Dai uses his body to depict (1) the self and (2) an object that is close to his desires in other men. A self-portrait, to Dai, can therefore represent the loneliness and solitude in queer youth and the subsequent transformations queer men often go through in adulthood before finding a meaningful physical or emotional connection to an other. Dai’s undergraduate senior photography final project during his time at Yale (Untitled) was prompted by artist Chen Ronghui who challenged Dai to make work about his identity without leveraging physical bodies.  Chen asked a series of questions that still finds its way into Dai’s work today: Why does modern art commenting on the Asian experience need to have an Asian body in it? Can a still-life or landscape say just as much about the Asian identity? In Untitled, Dai creates a collection of experimental self-portraits, a majority of which do not contain the body but rather small or obscured remnants of the body/mind. Dai continues to explore the boundaries of self-portraiture and what it can constitute.

Dai has most recently shown at “(In)Directions: Queerness in Contemporary Chinese Photography” at Eli Klein. He has been featured in Hyperallergic, Photo Vogue, The Asian American Arts Alliance, Whitehot Magazine, and Flaunt Magazine.

Dai has most recently been working on a new series (My American Portraits). Please inquire below to view.

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