Duan Jianyu’s Poetics of Everyday Absurdity Take Over Beijing

There are artists who observe the world from above, and others who gather its most ordinary fragments: a conversation overheard in the street, an image found online, a domestic gesture, an absurd detail. Duan Jianyu belongs to the latter category. In the major exhibition dedicated to her practice by the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, painting becomes a fluid territory where popular culture, memory, irony, and everyday life coexist without hierarchy. Daisies, a Light Breeze, No Relatives Writing Poems traces roughly a decade of the artist’s work through paintings, sculptures, and installations. The exhibition unfolds through images that appear light and playful, yet are charged with deeper tensions: Chinese youth subcultures, desires shaped by consumerism, reinvented traditional myths, and female figures far removed from stereotypes of grace and perfection. Her women, often solid, calm, and self-possessed, seem to exist, at last, beyond the gaze of others. Through a painterly language that is free, instinctive, and unexpectedly narrative, Duan Jianyu creates scenes suspended between dream, satire, and reality. The result is an unpredictable visual universe that captures contemporary life with humor, tenderness, and a subtle sense of melancholy.