Duan Jianyu


Duan Jianyu is a visual artist. She graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. She currently teaches at the Fine Arts Department of South China Normal University. Duan works and lives in Guangzhou. The style of Duan Jianyu’s paintings tend to start out with everyday reality, and then midway through fade out and slip slowly into the world of the mind. This kind of narrative technique appears consistently in the artist’s creations. Duan Jianyu’s large-scale paintings present incongruous scenarios drawing on a wide range of sources from European art history, classical Chinese painting, and imagery of traditional rural life. She has also created multi-media installations, artist’s books, photographs, and ink paintings on cardboard. In her work, European nudes, Chinese landscapes, chickens, watermelons and air hostesses come together to explore with wry humor the clashes between urban and rural, tradition and modernity in a society undergoing enormous change.

Exhibitions

Duan Jianyu's work was featured in “15 Years Chinese Contemporary Art Award,” , 2014; “Dai hanzhi, 5000 artists,” UCCA, Beijing, 2014; “A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan”, Rockbund Art Museum, 2013; “Ink art: Past as Present in Contemporary China,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013; “Face,” , Shanghai, 2012; “Nostalgia East Asia Contemporary Art Exhibition,” Korea Foundation, 2011; “China China China!,” Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, 2009; the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial “Farewell to Post-Colonialism,” , Guangzhou, 2008; “China Welcomes You… Desires, Struggles, New Identities,” Kunsthaus Graz, 2007; “Octomania,” Para-Site Art space, Hong Kong, 2006; the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; Gwangju Biennale, 2002.

Awards

Duan Jianyu is the winner of Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 2010, Best Artist.