Exhibition
Duan Jianyu
Yúqiáo
Free admission
The inaugural exhibition of the newly launched YDP space, Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo is the artist’s first major solo show in the UK in over a decade.
The exhibition centres on Yúqiáo, a classical Chinese motif depicting a fisherman and a woodcutter as reclusive archetypes who reflect on human histories from a contemplative distance. Duan reimagines these figures as shape-shifting characters, including goats, cows, a black cat detective and the artist herself. These figures drift from pastoral landscapes into the sprawl of contemporary life, bridging historical tales, childhood memories, and the fractal patterns of the present day. By unleashing Yúqiáo from its classical framework and replanting it in the textures of everyday life, Duan invites reflection on the quiet wisdom embedded in daily experience amid a fractured global reality.
Spread across three floors, the exhibition features twenty new paintings and a group of sculptures from the Yúqiáo series, along with a salon-style display of earlier works and archival materials.
Curated by Yang Zi in collaboration with YDP.
Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo, 2025, installation view. Photography: Wenxuan Wang. Image Courtesy YDP.
An exhibition catalogue co-published by YDP and Mousse Publishing will accompany the show, featuring newly commissioned essays by writer and journalist Bang Wang and curators Yang Zi and Lydia Yee, along with a conversation between Yang and the artist.
Duan Jianyu, a documentary film commissioned by YDP on the occasion of Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo, 2025.
Header images:
Duan Jianyu, Yúqiáo (The Fisherman and The Woodcutter) No.7-2, 2024. Image courtesy of the Artist and Vitamin Creative Space.
Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo, 2025, installation view. Photography: Wenxuan Wang. Image Courtesy YDP.
About the Artist
Currently based in Guangzhou, Duan Jianyu (b. 1970, 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.
Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo is the first English-language catalogue dedicated to the Guangzhou-based artist. It accompanies her solo exhibition, on view from 14 October to 20 December 2025. The catalogue features twenty new paintings, creative writings by guest curator Yang Zi and journalist Bang Wang, an essay by curator Lydia Yee, and a conversation between Duan and Yang. 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. The catalogue offers multiple perspectives on the artist’s practice, rooted locally yet resonant globally.
Order your copy here.
Duan Jianyu: Yúqiáo
2025 English 60 pages Hardcover, 23.5 × 32 cm ISBN 978-88-6749-693-8 €35 / $40 / £30
Texts by Yan Du, Yang Zi, Bang Wang, and Lydia Yee, and a conversation between Yang Zi and Duan Jianyu
Design by Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey
