Prologue・戴
DAI
A love letter from the founder
Emma Dai
I have never really given much thought to my surname; or at least, I haven’t until now. I always obsessed over my first name, naturally, as this is how everyone addresses me; my surname, by comparison, is a formality—an administrative necessity.
However, as is often the case in the Chinese language, these three letters—or one character, for that matter—span a vast range of meaning which I could never hope to fathom in its entirety. This character ties me to my ancestors, locates me within a generational system; a hierarchy that dates back to the beginnings of civilisation. It holds far more weight than my relatively generic Western forename ever could.
Shame was subconsciously attached to my surname from a young age. When a red squiggle has underlined it in every word-processing document since childhood, and I continue to spell it out to strangers with the NATO phonetic alphabet to this day, thought patterns of inconvenience and embarrassment became second-nature. When I was in school, it was one of a few ways people resorted to make fun of me. After all, it’s a homonym of the English word “die”, and children are immature enough to pick at anything outside of what they consider to be the usual associations and customs. It was probably this insignificant moment that I decided I would never consider my surname as a representation of me or my work, in any formal capacity.
In my teen years, I’d play with it somewhat, in an almost self-deprecating manner: my first Instagram account was hotappledai, and my friend Kat and I would jokingly craft the pun Daimonds that later became the slogan I put on the back of my school leavers’ hoodie. It was funny, and it was fun. It was never serious.
But as I’ve become more curious about my culture in recent years and taken more of an interest in picking up the language again, I’ve had a second look at my surname and realised just how little I really know. About myself, about the world, about how to even get started with knowing. I am only twenty-one, but I feel as though time is running away from me and the learning possibilities are endless. Now, when I look at my surname, I see potential—for puns (obviously, my first thought), but also much more beyond that.
I don’t want to make art solely for the sake of aesthetics, not that that’s an invalid reason to make art. Multiple millennia of art history stand as vindication. But it’s not the main direction I want to drive forward, in the same way I don’t just want to design for a client or a target market (although given that this may well develop into a for-profit venture, it will be an inevitable side-effect). I want to spark conversations, meet people, make progress together—because, cliché as it sounds, we are so much more than ourselves, in the same way that my surname is far more than meets the eye. I’ve always enjoyed my own company, but they say no (wo)man is an island, as I’ve learnt from all the inspired opportunities I’ve been gifted by those I’ve connected with in my career.
Ultimately, I want to bring together these familiar talents and welcome those I’m yet to meet into this global community, because they—like me—have so much to share and I have so much to learn from them.