Duan Jianyu: Foot

Wang Ke, a young and gifted poet, would have verses welled up in his throat at any moment.

His talent in poetry would never be an obstacle for him to become a finest food-carving cook, or to gladly be a security guard in a university. His secret connection with poetry or “the art of living” seem to bound his fate with Uncle Zhang, Natasha, and his wife Young Mei. They are meant to meet each other. Hence, Duan Jianyu portraits this oddness about ordinary lives in her novel Foot. ”

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 Feng Zhiyin

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