“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.
- Ruth Noack (from the back cover of the publication)

This book accompanies the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 2010, where Duan Jianyu is the Winner of ‘Best Artist’. This publication includes Duan’s paintings from 2001 to 2010 and essays by multiple authors.

English and Chinese |Design: Huang He |Sizes: 22.7×26.2cm |Pages: 58 P |This book accompanies the CCAA  Awards∕Blue Kingfisher limited & Vitamin Creative Space, idea and realization Vitamin Creative Space and Duan Janyu, 2011|ISBN 978-988-19912-3-2

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