Duan Jianyu

Based in Guangzhou, Duan Jianyu (born 1970 in Zhengzhou) is known for her deceptively childlike visual language and stylistic hybridity. While painting is at the core of her practice, her work includes sculpture, writing and other forms. Often realised in series, Duan's work is deeply narrative in nature, deploying juxtapositions and displacements of imagery and rhetoric to unsettle established binaries between Western and Chinese visual traditions, the high and the low, the mundane and the sublime, offering an incisive reflection on the enduring vitality of life within a fractured global reality. She was awarded Best Artist at the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) in 2010, and has exhibited widely, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), among others.