“By his own account, femininity serves as a significant source of inspiration for Han Dai-Yu. ‘The painting of the female body liberates me from my own [male] identity and gives me a higher level of freedom in my artistic expression. I believe that females are better able to represent the human being as a whole.’ In his hands, the female form is also capable of representing the sometimes difficult and vexing experiences of humans in transition, when we have ‘lost touch with the soil’ in search of the new – when are neither here nor there, in-between homes, jobs, lovers, identities, and creative preoccupations, when something old has been completed, but the future has not yet begun. Fantasy blends with reality to reflect the deeper levels of human experience in paintings that are as enigmatic as they are mesmerizing. ‘My art highlights the differences between realism and idealism,’ Dai-Yu notes. ‘This entire project is about creating beauty, or at least something that I consider as such.’ With his paintings of floating women, etherized as they are against the void, he certainly succeeds.”