by Ruth Noack

“Life is a heap of mixed material of unclear quality.” This assertion by Duan Jianyu points to the philosophical nature of her art. Purposely avoiding the painterly sublime, she strives for the most generic subject matter and she delves into banal expression and style. The chickens, which appear in many of her photographs, multi-media installations and paintings are a metaphor for this interest in the ordinary. Yet hers is not a naive or even narrative description of everyday life. Instead, she uses a highly refined method of displacement, that propells the work into a realm where we start thinking of art as a language and painting as a medium. Her displacements include combining the wrong elements on a canvas, or mixing up poetry and poetics in her writing, or travelling to Qinghai Province on an extended stay, when instead she might have come to a thriving city center, the market place for art. Once, she claimed to have discovered an abandoned painting by Julian Schnabel in a Chinese chicken coop.

“Many minor things in our lives seem to be trivial and simple, but they contain a great many scientific knowledge and skills,”  writes the artist. The Jury of the CCAA 2010 is impressed by the level of sophistication Duan Jianyu shows in keeping the categories of aesthetic judgement in suspense. Duan Jianyu is highly educated about the traditions of art history and the trends of contemporary art, and she uses this knowledge in a self-reflexive way, but her work never becomes academic or didactic. Her sincerity about the fundamental role of art in life is matched by her ambitious scope: To use art as a medium to tell basic truths about conditions of contemporaneity. Both in the context of Chinese painting and in comparison to international art production, her quirky poetic works have managed to surprise and elate us. We are happy to announce that we voted her “Best Artist”  in the CCAA 2010.

1970 Born in Henan, currently teaches at the Fine Arts Department of South China Normal University.
1995 Graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts

Solo Exhibitions
2008  China International Gallery Exposition—- 33 Young Asian Artists’ solo show, Beijing, China
            Plateau Life Guide—Now in Coming Art Project, atate3 space, Beijing, China

Group Exhibitions
2010    Jungle, Platform China, Beijing, China
               Reshaping history: Chinart form 2000 to 2009, China national convention center, Beijing
2009    Species of Space, Art Basel 40
               Go home” Art Basel Miami Beach 2009

2008  China China China!!!” Palazzo Strozzi, Piazza Strozzi, Florence
             Guangzhou Station–Special Exhibition for Contemporary Art of Guangdong” Guangdong museum of art          
            Notes of Conception: Alocal Narration of Chinese Contemporary painting Beijing Iberia center for contemporary
             Our future: The Guy & Miriam Ullens Foundation collection” Beijing UCCA
             Farewell to Post-Colonialism–the Third Guangzhou Triennial Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art
           “a better life” the shop for Frieze Art Fair 2008 England
            Departure-Contemporary art exhibition of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hongkong and Macao Shenzhen Hexiangning Art Museum