Cousins are two artists who meet half way through the journey: treading on different paths that sometimes, at some points, intersect. A journey through the pastoral and the mundane, the magical and the farcical, Cousins tells the stories of two artists who explore different practices and come from different backgrounds and yet, sometimes, happen to cross their paths somewhere through the itinerary.
Cousins is published in two different formats, with orange or blue tinted pages.
About Duan Jianyu
Born in 1970 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, Duan Jianyu graduated from the oil painting department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 1995. She currently teaches at the South China Normal University of the Arts in Guangzhou.
Duan Jianyu’s work bizarrely bring us to a blurry and slightly annoying place. Her paintings recall a boundary that is mentally non-tangible in our daily lives. Yet they precisely recall the feeling of living in modern and contemporary China under globalization. Duan Jianyu strives for the most generic subjects matter and she delves into banal expression and style, and very much about life in the present tense. Her painting grows from its proto-concept and outline of different modes of living into a painted reality. Continuously impacted, resisted, altered and formed by the pictures that emerge from different influences, situations and awarenesses, this reality has the same complexity as the material reality before us. Duan Jianyu wanders the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, so-called narrative follows the logic of painting itself, and unknown experiences open up.
About Sigrid Holmwood
Sigrid Holmwood, born in Hobart in 1978, studied at Oxford University and graduated from the Royal College of Art, Currently lives and works in Sweden.
Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019
Size: 17.5cm x 28.3 cm
Pages: 278
Year: 2012