RESEARCH
The Zither Player Is Holding a Knife
For thirty years, Duan Jianyu has painted people and animals that don't fit — and through them, kept asking who gets to decide how a painting should be understood.
I. The Cow Sees the Knife
In Duan Jianyu's Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and the Woodcutter) series, a man sits playing the guqin in front of four cows. The painting borrows the Chinese idiom dui niu tan qin — "playing the zither to a cow" — meaning: no matter how skilled the playing, the cow won't understand, so the problem is assumed to lie with the cow. Look closer, though, and what the musician holds isn't a pick. It's a handful of table knives. The lead cow turns its head, eyes fixed on him. It may not understand the guqin, but it understands exactly what a knife means.
Changing one prop is enough to flip the relationship the idiom assumes. The musician still occupies the position of civilization, knowledge, and expression; the cow is still the silent listener. But the musician also holds the tool that decides the cow's fate. "Not understanding" stops mattering. What the cow needs to judge was never whether the music is good — it's what this person is about to do.
The painting is a way into understanding Duan Jianyu more broadly. Her work typically opens with a familiar image — a classical landscape, a pastoral scene, a village figure, a flight attendant, a flock of chickens or sheep, a body that looks lifted straight out of art history. Look a little longer and the order in the picture starts to come loose. A figure's gesture doesn't match the story it's supposedly in; an animal has taken a human's place; a beautiful landscape gets interrupted by an abrupt brushstroke or a slapstick body. She isn't in a hurry to build a new world from scratch — she waits until the viewer thinks they've recognized something, then quietly swaps out one prop.
Duan Jianyu was born in Zhengzhou in 1970 and graduated from the oil painting department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1995; she has lived and worked in Guangzhou ever since. Her career runs almost exactly parallel to the rapid transformation of the Pearl River Delta over the past thirty years: cities expanding, populations moving between countryside and city, commercial imagery and consumer taste flooding daily life — while rural experience never disappeared, only got carried into the new urban environment in the form of migrant labor, cheap goods, local custom, and family memory.
Duan Jianyu never painted this shift as a skyline or a piece of social documentary. What she left instead is more fragmentary: a woman carrying a red-white-blue striped tote bag, a modern figure that doesn't belong in a classical landscape, a crowd of chickens, a scene that looks lifted from a piece of commercial decor, characters caught somewhere between farmer, deity, tourist, and performer. These figures resist being filed under any single narrative of the era — which is precisely what lets them hold onto the messiness of actual life. In an era that houses classical painting, Socialist Realist residue, hotel-lobby decoration, and internet slang all at once, a unified style would be the less honest choice.
II. Why She Keeps "Ruining" the Painting
Duan Jianyu once described her own painting this way: "I like elegance, but I can't reach it. My paintings always look like someone spat on a beautiful landscape painting." It's easy to hear that as false modesty. Put back into the work, it reads more like a method.
She has full academic training — she knows exactly how to stabilize a composition, coordinate a brushstroke, how a "good painting" typically builds visual credibility. She chooses, right as the picture is about to become smooth, to drop something wrong into it: spray paint, marker, pencil, and oil pastel layered over the oil paint; a stiffly posed contemporary figure interrupting a classical landscape; a scene that could have read as lyrical, broken by a piece of slang or an awkward body.
She also draws, over the long term, on the visual language of xínghuà (行画) — mass-produced "trade painting," made to size, by subject, for decorative effect, and hung in hotels, restaurants, wedding-planning offices, and furniture showrooms. It's rarely treated as painting worth discussing, because its function is too obvious: fill a wall, match a room, produce a kind of respectability that doesn't require close looking. Duan Jianyu brings this bottom-tier painting into her own work without simply upgrading it into "fine art." She keeps its cheapness, and keeps the awkward, mimicking desire embedded in it.
This isn't only about the era's subject matter — rural-urban migration, consumer society — showing up in the paintings. More importantly, over the past thirty years, the very standards for what counts as respectable, modern, and tasteful have kept shifting fast. A decorative style that signals urban sophistication today can look dated and tacky tomorrow; rural imagery once read as backward can pick up new cultural value on the art market. Duan Jianyu isn't in a hurry to rehabilitate any particular taste. She leaves images that look down on each other sitting on the same canvas, so that neither can easily claim the higher ground.
Today, this "not good-looking enough" painting has entered a major institutional retrospective and become the language by which Duan Jianyu is most easily recognized. There's an unavoidable shift built into that: a style of painting that once offended taste can also become a recognized personal signature. The question worth asking, then, has moved — not whether she still counts as "bad painting," but whether roughness, slapstick, and dissonance can still unsettle a viewer once they've already been validated.
III. Shamate and the Facekini
The 2014–2016 series Sha, Sha, Shamate opens the current UCCA retrospective. "Shamate" emerged in the early 2000s among young rural migrants working in Chinese cities, who built a short-lived identity for themselves out of exaggerated hairstyles, cheap, flashy clothing, usernames, selfies, and online communities. Urban public opinion turned the look into a joke almost immediately — photos got reposted, the style got imitated, and the people behind it were rarely seen as people with actual lives.
Duan Jianyu didn't repaint Shamate youth as dignified, upright, sympathetic portraits. That gesture, however well-intentioned, would still have the artist deciding on their behalf what counts as respectable. Instead she kept the exaggeration, the awkwardness, the cheapness already built into the look, and set it inside a broken, serial sequence of images — figures seem to be mid-story, but the plot never resolves, and the viewer never gets a comfortable sociological conclusion to land on.
What's sharpest about these paintings is that they don't perform a belated act of vindication on behalf of the mocked. Duan Jianyu leaves "this looks ridiculous" sitting right there in the image, while also making the viewer aware that laughter itself has a history. Who gets to call their own aesthetic a "style," and whose look only ever gets called tacky, isn't decided by color and haircut alone — income, education, household registration, occupation, and city of residence all weigh in on that judgment.
The same logic switches objects in the Facekini series (2019). The facekini first appeared on beaches in Qingdao — a full-face swim hood invented by middle-aged and older women for sun and jellyfish protection, plainly functional, plainly unglamorous. It went viral online along much the same path as Shamate: first circulated as a curiosity, called "ugly," "terrifying," "strictly for aunties," with little interest in who actually invented and wore it, or why. Duan Jianyu doesn't turn the facekini into a curiosity either, and doesn't turn the women wearing it into subjects needing rescue — this series, together with Woman Hiding in the Wardrobe to Avoid Chores (2020), is concerned with the bodily experience and psychological space of middle-aged women: not the young, slim, elegant ideal, but a figure that is strong, heavyset, unhurried, and pleased with itself — a subject that isn't there to please the viewer.
Shamate and the facekini, then, aren't separate social subjects that happen to show up in her work — they're the same move made twice, on two different targets: rural youth mocked by mainstream urban opinion, and older women's bodies mocked by mainstream taste. Both had already entered modern life without gaining the vocabulary modern life uses to describe itself; both could afford the goods, or had already solved their own practical needs in the plainest way available, without ever holding the power to define what counts as tasteful. Duan Jianyu doesn't stand outside the frame correcting them. What interests her is whether a painting can hold this kind of presence — not quite proper, not quite respectable — without flinching.
IV. Chickens, Sheep, and Cows
Animals show up early in Duan Jianyu's work. Artistic Chicken (2002–04) is made of more than a hundred hand-painted, realistic chicken sculptures, packed densely across the gallery floor. Each one is handmade, yet the sheer number makes them read like something mass-produced — caught somewhere between craft object, poultry model, and artwork, never quite settling into a stable identity.
By the time of the Yúqiáo series, animals stop being a crowd gathered in the gallery. They start occupying the position classical culture once reserved for people. Yúqiáo — "the fisherman and the woodcutter" — is a recurring hermit figure in Chinese painting and literature: two men withdrawn from the centers of power, standing outside history to discuss its rise and fall. Duan Jianyu hands those two roles to sheep, cows, chickens, and a black cat, pulling them out of the pastoral background and into the center of the frame.
In the tradition, the fisherman and the woodcutter hold two postures at once — worldly engagement and withdrawal from it. They have no attachment to the city, and have seen through its mundane concerns; that very detachment is what earns them the standing to sit among green mountains, compose poetry, and pass judgment freely on the affairs of the world. What interests Duan Jianyu is what these two roles would look like today — she treats yúqiáo as a kind of historical witness, present for the changes, answerable to no particular moment. It's also why her brushwork keeps interrupting the picture's own credibility. She has described the disruptive brushstrokes she introduces as something close to Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt in theatre: just as an audience settles into a story, an actor reminds them it's only a play. Duan Jianyu's landscapes carry the same reminder — a streak of spray paint, an abrupt marker line, breaking the illusion that this is a "real" landscape, again and again. The fisherman and the woodcutter were supposed to watch history from outside it; when Duan Jianyu paints them, she won't let the viewer treat the picture as a real, distant place to disappear into either.
In one painting, a flock of sheep surrounds a human figure standing with arms outstretched. The artist has said the sheep are interrogating the man — asking why they were raised only to become food. In another, a cow listens to the guqin while watching the knife in the musician's hand. The animals haven't suddenly acquired human language; they've simply started looking back. That alone is enough to change the picture, because looking was always a human privilege: people observe animals, paint animals, eat animals, and decide on animals' behalf what they have or haven't understood. This cow's situation is specific: a man performs civilization in front of it while holding onto the power to do whatever he wants with its body.
V. Michelin Doesn't Have Seven Stars
The title of the Michelin Seven Stars series (2020) also comes from a small dislocation. The Michelin Guide tops out at three stars; "seven stars" doesn't exist. The invented rating doesn't sound unfamiliar, though, because consumer culture routinely relies on this kind of language to manufacture difference: more refined, scarcer, closer to a life someone else can't have.
Duan Jianyu's interest isn't luxury consumption itself, but how taste turns into a hierarchy that presents itself as natural. Restaurants, hotels, paintings, and human bodies can all be dropped into the same scale — some read as refined, some as vulgar; some are worth serious attention, some are only fit to be background. By setting trade painting, classical painting, and slapstick imagery side by side, she's disrupting exactly that smooth sorting.
Push the idea one step further: "refined" and "inferior" turn out to be what's left over once a judgment has already been produced — not a property carried by a painting, a product, or a cow itself. That judgment might come from an unwritten consensus accumulated over time within the art world; it might come from the market, via box office or price; or it might come from an administrative system responsible for approvals, subsidies, or permits. These systems rarely consult each other, and their standards often contradict one another — the same object can be "unqualified" in one and unexpectedly "qualified" in another, or the reverse. What Duan Jianyu is interested in is how that judgment gets manufactured in the first place, not handing out a fairer rating on anyone's behalf.
The 2026 painting A Minimalist Exhibition Failed Due to Excess Milk makes the same point more directly. A minimalist exhibition typically depends on a clean space, restrained form, a surface that looks like no one has ever touched it. The "excess milk" in the title shoves a lactating body into that space instead. Milk won't hold a geometric shape, and won't obey an exhibition's demand for tidiness and restraint. A show built around pure form ends up wrecked by a specific, excessive bodily experience.
Another new painting, Daisies, the Most Innocent Flowers in the World, takes up the relationship between mother and child. The title sounds almost sweet — but "most innocent" is too complete a judgment. The women and mothers in Duan Jianyu's paintings rarely fit that kind of completeness: their bodies are heavy, their postures loose, sometimes tough, sometimes exhausted, sometimes entirely uninterested in the viewer. She hasn't arranged lived experience into an elegant shape before sending it into the museum.
From the early chickens, to Shamate youth, to rural women inside classical landscapes, to a lactating body — Duan Jianyu keeps leaving in the parts mainstream taste would rather discard. She doesn't clean them up, and doesn't rush to declare that they carry some higher value instead. She simply refuses to let "doesn't look good enough" be where the conversation ends.
VI. The Knife Is Still in His Hand
The idiom dui niu tan qin assigns positions to both parties in advance: the musician holds the skill and the knowledge; the cow, unable to understand, comes off as dull. Once the communication fails, the musician never has to examine himself — he only has to blame the audience for being the wrong one.
By putting a knife in the musician's hand, Duan Jianyu exposes a condition the original story kept hidden. The musician and the cow were never equal participants in an exchange. The former gets to define what counts as music, and also holds power over the latter's life. The music here isn't just a piece of culture the cow fails to understand — it may also be a posture: a person performing civilization while refusing to give up the power in his hand.
This also explains why Duan Jianyu keeps reaching for imagery that's rough, slapstick, and looked down on. She isn't campaigning for these images to receive some new top rating — she's making the act of rating itself visible. When a viewer calls a painting childish, an outfit tacky, a piece of trade painting low-grade, or a cow incapable of understanding anything, they're not just describing the object in front of them. They're also confirming where they themselves stand.
Whether the cow understands the music stops mattering at this point. It turns its head because there's another sound behind the playing. The musician may still believe he's facing an unqualified listener. The cow has already seen the knife in his hand.
Installation view of DUAN JIANYU’s “Yúqiáo,” at YDP, London, 2025. Photo by Wenxuan Wang. Courtesy YDP.
DUAN JIANYU, Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) No.1, 2023, oil, acrylic, spray paint, and pencil on canvas, 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
DUAN JIANYU, Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) No.4, 2023, oil, acrylic, and pencil on canvas, 200 x 140 cm
DUAN JIANYU, Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) No.7-1, 2024, oil, acrylic, oil-based marker, oil pastel, and pencil on canvas, 180 x 250 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.
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