contact

Alec Dai is a photographer based in nyc. He is interested in using photography as a communication tool to unveil parts of his cultural and sexual identities that haven’t always been seen, let alone celebrated. To Dai, photography is a language that offers a peek behind the curtains to be cemented into static imagery and revisited forever.

His recent work, “My American Portraits,” explores his upbringing in his childhood backyard in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (home to a large population of immigrants from Guangdong, China where my parents are from). The series is a collaborative project with his parents in displaying meaningful domestic items and scenes that publicly challenge the image of the American home. The concept of the American backyard, established in the 1950s as an extension of the American dream, was actively reconstructed by his parents when they paved over the grass with concrete. The white backdrop is used to present evidence of his parent’s daily labor at direct odds with the green-lawn, white-picket-fence performance. The objects/scenes recall his upbringing in an immigrant home: a father’s tools, a queer boy’s memory of hanging clothes with his mother, bitter melon climbing on metal pipes staked into the ground. Throughout the series, the sheet and staging come apart, asking the audience to question what is formally presented and what is revealed in the background— allowing us to see the beauty in what we often seek to hide and what we don’t even realize we’re hiding, especially in the chase of a picture-perfect American upbringing.

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, I-D Magazine, and Flaunt Magazine. He will also be pursuing an MFA in photography at Yale University in 2025.