In the early 1990s, David Diao began to incorporate biographical elements that include themes of his Chinese heritage, emigration, and displacement. The artist left to America in 1955 at age 12, and his whole mother’s side of the family has been lost to him because of the civil war in China. 30 years later, Diao returned to Chengdu for the first time and discovered a lot of history about the family he didn’t know, one of which was his maternal grandfather, Changheng Yin, who was a significant military and political figure in the history of China, famous for taking down the Qing Dynasty and quelling the revolt for independence on the part of the Tibetans. In this 2017 painting, Diao references his familial ancestor by silkscreen printing a few pages of his grandfather’s book.