The first English-language catalogue dedicated to the Guangzhou-based artist.
This publication accompanies Duan Jianyu's first major UK solo exhibition in more than a decade and the inaugural programme at the London-based non-profit project space YDP (Yan Du Projects, 4 October–20 December 2025). The catalogue features twenty new paintings that reimagine yúqiáo—a classical Chinese motif of a fisherman and a woodcutter as wise, reclusive figures—into Duan's shape-shifting characters: goats, cows, a black cat detective, and the artist herself, revealing quiet wisdom, humour, and vitality in daily life. Functioning as a parallel dialogue to the exhibition, the catalogue sits between conventional documentation and an artist's book, echoing Duan's distinctive narrative approach and inviting readers to drift through the textures of her imaginative world. Creative writings by Yang Zi and Bang Wang, an essay by Lydia Yee, and a conversation between Duan and Yang offer multiple perspectives on the artist's practice, rooted locally yet resonant globally.
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.
