At a Glance
- Artist
- Duan Jianyu · born 1970, Zhengzhou, Henan Province
- Discipline
- Painting, with sculpture and works on paper
- Exhibition
- Daisies, a Light Breeze, No Relatives Writing Poems · UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing · May 1–August 30, 2026 (closed)
- Why it matters
- A painter who treats ordinary life — family, chores, food, social media — as material worth preserving
- Verified
- October 5, 2026
The Ordinary Becomes Art
A Flower, a Mother and an Artist Paying Attention
A daisy is about the most ordinary flower there is. That is exactly why Duan Jianyu chose it. In 2026 she finished a large canvas called Daisies, the Most Innocent Flowers in the World, and in UCCA’s audio guide she explains that the daisy was the only image that came to mind when she tried to describe mothers and daughters.[3]
The painting grew out of something many families know. Her mother, now in her eighties, lives in a nursing home in Guangzhou. Duan visits often. After two decades of living in different cities, the two have grown closer — and the closeness has made her feelings more complicated, not less.[3] She calls the bond between mother and child simple and pure, and at the same time the most complex relationship in the world.[3]
That is the doorway into her work. Not a museum, not an auction record, not a history lecture. A flower, a mother, and an artist paying attention.
Ordinary subjects
Mothers, chores, food, pets and social media feeds.
Humor as a tool
Absurd stories that make familiar lives look new.
History, reimagined
Ancient sages and old masters brought into the present.
The Artist
Who Is Duan Jianyu?
Duan Jianyu was born in 1970 in Zhengzhou, in Henan Province, and graduated from the oil painting department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1995.[1][2] She has taught at the South China Normal University of the Arts in Guangzhou, and she has been painting for nearly three decades.[1]
Her work has travelled widely. She showed at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 2015 and the Guggenheim in New York in 2018, and she won the Best Artist Award at the 2010 Chinese Contemporary Art Awards.[1] UCCA, the Beijing institution that presented her 2026 survey, describes her as one of the most significant figures in contemporary Chinese painting.[1]
That survey, Daisies, a Light Breeze, No Relatives Writing Poems, ran from May 1 to August 30, 2026. It was her first institutional solo exhibition in Beijing and, by UCCA’s account, her most comprehensive presentation to date in scope and time span.[1] Curated by UCCA Chief Curator Chelsea Qianxi Liu, it brought together about 50 paintings, five groups of sculptures, a series of painting installations and selected works on paper, arranged in six sections.[1]
The title says a lot. Daisies and a light breeze are modest things that are still full of life. The phrase “No Relatives Writing Poems” comes from a poem by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska — a line that sounds like a plain fact about someone’s family, yet quietly joins poetry to everyday life.[1][2]
How She Works
Painting Real Life Without Simply Copying It
That small measurement explains a great deal. For Duan, a painting should stay near life without becoming a copy of it. At that distance, a picture can borrow from reality, imagine beyond it and end up larger than the life it started from.[3]
She did not always work this way. After art school she found Expressionism too Western and turned to straightforward, literary storytelling.[3] Around the mid-2010s she shifted to building series — groups of paintings that work together like chapters.[1][3] The first was Sharp, Sharp, Smart (2014–2016), about 20 works that take their cue from “Shamate,” a youth subculture that emerged in China in the early 2000s.[1][3] Into these paintings she mixed folk stories, craft traditions, internet slang, social media posts and mass-produced commercial art.[1]
The clearest example of her method may be a 2025 series, Dumplings Were Discovered in the Ruins. Duan wanted to paint food delivery riders, who work long hours at dangerous speeds. But she worried that a realistic painting of a “lower-class” worker would look down on him.[3] So she invented an absurd story instead: a rider rushing to deliver ancient dumplings freshly dug out of an archaeological site, with the customer’s craving growing as the delivery gets closer.[3] The joke changes the relationship. The rider is no longer an object of pity; he is the hero of a strange, funny and oddly believable tale.
She applies the same honesty to herself. In Michelin Seven Stars (2020), inspired by restaurant photos on her WeChat feed, she painted herself shaped like a tire — a nod to the tire company behind the Michelin guide.[3] She often uses her own face, she explains, because then she cannot offend anyone by painting them unflatteringly.[3]
Women, Space and Inner Life
A Room of One’s Own
UCCA identifies the lives of women — especially middle-aged women — as one of Duan’s central subjects.[1] In her Facekini series (2019) and in Women Hiding in the Wardrobe to Avoid Chores (2020), her women are not young, slim or graceful in the conventional sense. They are strong, relaxed and at ease, absorbed in their own sensations rather than posed for anyone watching.[1]
The Facekini paintings began with something she saw on social media: women over 40 swimming at the seaside in full-face sun masks. At first she found it funny. Over time, she says, amusement turned into respect and even envy of their boldness.[3]
In 2026 she painted A Room of One’s Own, a large canvas measuring 180 by 250 centimeters.[1] The title borrows from Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. UCCA describes the work as pointing to the physical and psychological space women need.[1] Duan adds that Woolf tied that space to two conditions — a physical room and financial independence — and that a woman’s psychological space feels especially urgent under the pressures of contemporary life.[3]
Family and Emotional Memory
When Private Feeling Becomes Shared Memory
Duan’s family paintings show how private feeling can become shared memory. Beyond the daisy painting, her My Little Rabbit series grew from a pet rabbit that lived a little over three years — a small animal that caused some friction at home and carried the household through joy and sorrow.[3]
DMM analysis
Most families never document moments like these. A visit to a parent in a care home, an argument over a pet, a mother and daughter learning each other again in later life. By painting them with care and humor, Duan turns experiences that usually disappear into a record other people can recognize. That is one way culture is preserved: not only through monuments, but through attention.
The Wider Picture
The Artist Inside a Changing China
Contemporary Chinese art is not one visual language, and 2026 made that easy to see. While Duan’s paintings filled UCCA’s Beijing galleries, the institution’s seaside venue, UCCA Dune, presented Dark Surfaces by sculptor Yang Xinguang (April 19–October 11, 2026).[4] That show, his largest institutional solo to date, works with soil, plants and decay, built around the ecological idea of the forest-floor “litter layer.”[4][5]
In Venice, China’s official pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, Dream Stream (May 9–November 22, 2026), brought together calligraphy, painting, moving image and algorithmic modelling, and included the game studio behind Black Myth: Wukong.[6] It is curated by Yu Xuhong, president of the China Academy of Art.[6]
Painting, sculpture, ecology, games and code: these are different answers to the same question of what Chinese art can be now. Duan’s answer is a paintbrush and a close look at daily life.
Tradition and Freedom
Tradition Without Being Trapped by Tradition
Dream Stream takes its name from the Dream Stream Essays of Shen Kuo, a scholar of the Northern Song dynasty, and its organizers framed it around renewing tradition through innovation and joining art with technology.[6][7] It asks a question every artist eventually faces: how do you inherit a history without being held inside it?
Duan’s own answer is personal rather than technological. As a young student, she says, she rebelled against anything traditional. She later returned to older Chinese painters, including Li Tiefu, and found their work down-to-earth and moving.[3] After 40, she began studying painters of China’s Republican era, who trained in Japan and Europe and came home to fuse what they had learned.[3]
You can see this in Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) (2023–2024), a series of 20 paintings.[3] The fisherman and woodcutter are revered figures in Chinese culture, almost sages. Duan reimagines them as ordinary people in contemporary settings, facing everyday struggles and desires.[1][3] Tradition here is not a museum piece. It is a living story that ordinary people can step into.
From the Region
Shanghai Meets Paris
The conversation between Chinese art and the wider world is also on view right now in Shanghai. Shanghai et Paris: L’Abstraction à travers le temps runs at the Shanghai Art Museum (China Art Museum) from July 30 to October 18, 2026, with free admission, as part of the 2026 Festival Croisements of China–France cultural exchange.[8]
The exhibition gathers more than 100 works of painting, photography, sculpture and installation across three periods: 1890–1949, 1949–1999 and 2000–2026.[8] It traces how Paris shaped modern art while Shanghai brought those ideas to China through publishing and education, and it features artists such as Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun, along with 16 contemporary abstract artists based in France.[8] It is a fitting bridge to DMM Global Arts’ next destination: France and its pass Culture.
Why This Matters
DMM Analysis
Great art does not always begin with spectacle. Duan Jianyu’s survey made room for a mother in a nursing home, women swimming in sun masks, a woman hiding in a wardrobe from her chores, a delivery rider with impossible dumplings and a family rabbit. None of these subjects is grand. All of them are true to how people actually live.
That is the lesson DMM takes from her work. Culture is not only what gets put in textbooks. It is also the relationships, spaces, contradictions and jokes that most people pass by without recording. An artist who pays closer attention gives those moments a second life.
What's Next
What Future Generations Can Learn
Creative identity does not require choosing between the past and the present. Duan once rejected tradition, then went back to it on her own terms — and found that old masters and ancient sages could live comfortably beside social media, delivery apps and a pet rabbit.
For young artists anywhere, that is the takeaway. You can inherit a history without letting it set the limits of what you make. Start with what you know: your family, your street, your own face in the mirror. Then keep a little distance, and imagine.
What you can do
If you are in or near Shanghai, Shanghai et Paris is free and open until October 18, 2026.[8] UCCA has published its English audio guide for the Duan Jianyu exhibition online, with the artist describing her works in her own words.[3] And try her method yourself: choose one ordinary moment from your week and ask what it would look like if you told the truth about it, with a little imagination.
Sources
- UCCA Center for Contemporary Art — “Duan Jianyu: Daisies, a Light Breeze, No Relatives Writing Poems” (exhibition page, works, artist bio)
- UCCA — Exhibition Guide: preface and About the Artist
- UCCA — Audio Guide, Duan Jianyu in her own words
- UCCA Dune — “Yang Xinguang: Dark Surfaces”
- UCCA — “Yang Xinguang: Dark Surfaces” Exhibition Guide
- La Biennale di Venezia — National Participations, Biennale Arte 2026 (dates and media via My Art Guides listing)
- Hangzhou municipal government — “‘Dream Stream’ opens at China Pavilion” (May 11, 2026)
- Shanghai municipal government — “Abstract art show traces Shanghai-Paris dialogue” (Aug 20, 2026)
Method: DMM separates confirmed fact (with numbered sources), source-supported interpretation and labeled DMM analysis. Descriptions of artworks come only from UCCA and the artist’s recorded statements; DMM did not describe any painting from photographs, and no artwork images are reproduced. No institution was paid for coverage.
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