In a series of paintings that mix the old and the new, the profound and the mundane, the Guangzhou-based artist navigates the changing faces of everyday life in China
During the early 1990s, Duan Jianyu, originally from Zhengzhou, in Henan province, arrived in Guangzhou, southern China, to study painting at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. She quickly became a part of artist collective Daweixiang (Big-Tail Elephant), which was staging makeshift exhibitions and happenings at spaces ranging from bars to construction sites. And she never left. “Our creative approach was different from that of artists in northern cities like Beijing, where they were confronting society’s violence with their bodies,” Duan says over a video call. She’s referring to Beijing artists such as Zhang Huan, whose self-torturing performance works would involve using his own body as a site of representation, including his best-known work (a performance documented in photographs), 12 Square Meters (1994), which saw him rub fish oil all over his naked body and sit in a public latrine, attracting flies – a test of endurance and a commentary on the abject realities of living in the city. “We paid more attention to the details of everyday life,” she continues.
Guangzhou, at the turn of the century, was a place through which pop culture from around the world poured into the Chinese mainland. Cinemas started screening Hong Kong gangster films, street vendors sold knockoff cassettes and dakou VCDs (unsold films and music disks that piled up in Western warehouses, which then made their way into China as trash), propagating the work of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Danny Boyle and obscure arthouse productions. The cultural landscape was made up of patchy, hybridised trends, in which icons and references mutated between different cultural spaces and timelines – much of which informed Duan’s practice.
Duan’s series Sharp, Sharp, Smart (2014–16), for example, negotiates these disjunctive realities, taking inspiration from the ‘Shamate’ sub-culture that emerged from such a brooding mix. Shamate, a Chinese transliteration of the English word ‘smart’, was coined during the early 2000s by the movement’s ‘godfather’ Luo Fuxing, who learned the word when he Google-translated ‘fashion’ and thought it meant anything trendy and cool, which to him were studded leather jackets, ripped skinny jeans and heavily gelled, fluorescent hair, much like the emo trend in the West or the Japanese Visual Kei. Members of the Shamate culture largely comprised smalltown youth, many of them children left behind with relatives in the countryside, by parents who went to cities in search of labour, who then themselves grew up to be second-generation factory workers in coastal cities. Despite often being mocked by city dwellers as tasteless and visually offensive, these attention-grabbing Shamate outfits are nevertheless markers of an aesthetic aspiration, as well as one of the few ways their wearers achieved visibility and resistance to being nothing more than a cog in the country’s roaring economic machine. Sharp, Sharp, Smart takes us away from the sub-culture’s sensational – and sensationalised – style, and instead reveals in it a powerful claim of self-assertion and of converting something into one’s own.
In Sharp, Sharp, Smart No.1 (2014), two rural ladies each hold a chop-
ping knife, their shirts unbuttoned, their nipples exposed. Painted
in the geometric style of Kazimir Malevich’s Sportsmen (1931) – such quotations from art and cultural history remain a mainstay of the artist’s output – they stand staunchly against a blood-coloured landscape. The painting was made in response to the news of farmers’ land being stolen and expropriated for real-estate development during the early 2010s, as an imaginary vision in which the farmers make their presence known and feared. While rural scenes were often romanticised in the Socialist Realist tradition championed by Chinese art academies, Duan’s versions by contrast privilege physical reality over idealism. Here lies her astutely sympathetic observation: the two pairs of drooping breasts, for example, capture a rustic gesture of protest – a determination to suspend good manners and fight at any cost.
Duan continues to pay attention to everyday life in both its banal and fantastical realities via paintings that often capture wacky, surreal scenes reflecting disjunctive states of urban or rural life as a consequence of rapid change. Stylistically they flirt with the ugly and vulgar, infused with a deadpan and, at times, brutish humour. Characteristic of this is her exploitation of recurring motifs such as chickens: a clucking, flustered animal often roaming free in village yards, as well as a culinary delight (“the whole city of Guangzhou is very good at cooking chicken”, she boasts). For Duan, the animal represents a down-to-earth liveliness and a vehicle through which to poke fun at high-culture. In Sister No. 1 (2004), for example, three busty, tackily dressed ladies pose like supermodels while holding rather more earthy staples of rural produce: a watermelon, a bucket of fish and a hen. The women are dressed as flight attendants, which, at the time, represented a newly respectable career and a reflection of China’s participation in the global economy. Their offerings, however, spoil the profession’s courteous, cosmopolitan charm. In Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) No.17 (2024), a handful of chickens cluster inside a grand piano, with a smear of dark green impastoed on the piano’s open lid, the texture of which might pass as actual chicken shit. A young boy plays the instrument, evoking the idea of a wild mix of cacophonous sounds. “I think humour contains a kind of wisdom – an especially direct form of wisdom.”
This last work is part of Yúqiáo (2023–25), Duan’s most recent series of 20 paintings on view at the newly opened YDP in London. It takes inspiration from a classical Chinese motif dating, at least, to the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127 CE) that takes a fisherman and a woodcutter as embodiments of the lifestyle of the recluse: a wise, virtuous man retreating from society – and its dirt and grime – in search of spiritual transcendence by leading a simpler life. The trope, in which failing members of dynastic China’s scholar-official class often found solace, echoes a handful of narrative traditions, including the koan anecdotes of Chan Buddhism, which quotes quippy, eccentric punchlines told by Zen masters to enlighten their students. In the early-eleventh-century text ‘Dialogue of the Fisherman and the Woodcutter’ by neo-Confucianist Shao Yong (1011–77 CE), a series of philosophical musings emerge from the pair’s meandering conversations, on topics ranging from the art of fishing to that of ruling nations and being with nature: the question of whether or not fishing with bait constitutes cheating, for example, evolves into the discussion of the changing perspectives with which to evaluate virtue and vice, which leads, in turn, to a discussion about whether or not we’re at all different from our environment.
For Duan however the dialogue is much more quotidian. “What I’m drawn to”, the artist tells me, “is the mundane and ordinary aspects of their lives – a wise pair as they are, they’d still need to perhaps go sell fish and logs at the market and go about their lives.” In Duan’s version of the tales, any idea of transcendence remains firmly grounded. Yúqiáo… No.2 shows a lady – her likeness vaguely recognisable as the Monkey King from a comic scene in the 1986 TV series of the older tale Journey to the West (1592) – clad in red, cradling a baby monkey: picking up on the mythical monkey’s fusion of the heroic and the base to suggest that every sage has to deal with the everyday. Or that dreamers still have to confront reality.
The 20 canvases are roughly divided into four groups, starting with the imaginary going-abouts of the woodcutter and fisherman; the second grouping takes place on farmland, where animals confront their human owners and appear to question their fate; the third is a sidetrack into the imaginary day-to-day business of Duan’s childhood cartoon hero the Black Cat Detective (1984); the conclusion draws the previous scenes into contemporary urban life. References to classical, literary sources abound, but are evoked in a way that’s more iconoclastic than reverent; indeed, the closest you get to traditional paintings of saintly seclusion is in Yúqiáo… No.1, a work depicting gallery-going goats. In this work, a pair of goats gesticulate in front of what looks like a shanshui painting after Northern Song dynasty painter Fan Kuan’s famous Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (c. 1000). The goats are looking at a detail in the painting: a woodcutter who walks along a mountain path, carrying logs, with a monkey jumping along his side. Rather than one of admiration, their pointing fingers suggest a judging, gossiping gaze.
Yúqiáo becomes a space in which to engage with contemporary conditions of disengagement and to discuss human agency or the lack of it. In Yúqiáo…No.20, the literati recluse has become a slovenly, stay-at-home figure. At the centre is a solitary lady (a self-portrait) sitting on a bed littered with dirty linen and food packaging. A cat is her sole companion. The scene triggers a range of associations: urban life’s fast-paced, makeshift lifestyle, the sentiment of JOMO – the joy, as opposed to fear, ‘of missing out’ – and flashbacks to the claustrophobic pandemic lockdown. For the artist, too, this reflects the increasing disjuncture between realities of the physical and the digital sphere. “Nowadays, people may not go out for a month or two, constantly ordering takeout, and then all the garbage will pile up in the house,” Duan explains. “They may be influencers or livestream on social media. They may be well-known figures, but their homes may still be a mess.” It’s a rather sarcastic image of retreat motivated not by a desire for spiritual achievement, but something else. In China’s classical literati oeuvre, another saying goes, ‘If you are successful, you should help the world; if you are not recognised, you should take care of yourself’. Duan’s work suggests that this advice might still come in handy today.
Duan Jianyu’s exhibition Yúqiáo is on view at YDP, London, through 20 December
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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