Duan Jianyu: How to Travel with a Watermelon

The publication “How to Travel with a Watermelon” includes Duan Jianyu’s catalogue (selected painting from 1999 to 2006) , 3 pieces of Duan Jianyu’s print works and a text by Hu Fang.

Everything Duan Jianyu(born in 1970) wants to say, she says in her paintings. Here, textual guidance is superfluous, unless to provide a vague background: just like in some of her paintings, words are quoted, explanations coming from our daily lives, or perhaps the words uttered between a female radio broadcaster and a regretful audience confessing sexual transgressions on the air. Even her brushstrokes and palette point us toward an ineffable, slightly aggravating world. Her paintings summon us to envision a threshold we have no way of reaching in daily life, and with equal precision, they summon our feelings about contemporary Chinese reality. As such, they project the background of contemporary China, from the villages to the cities-full of vigor but also incredibly trite. Perhaps, cliché is just the crystallization of our own pursuit of modernity.

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. 

Photo by Wen Peng

Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019

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