Annely Juda Fine Art presents: "Cousins" an exhibition featuring two artists:Duan Jianyu and Sigrid Holmwood. This exhibition is in collaboration with Vitamin Creative Space Beijing and Guangzhou, China. Duan Jianyu will be showcasing her theme of "The Path of Beauty" and Sigrid Holmwood will be showcasing her theme of "Journey to WuMu - Paper Paintings".
The following information is presented from Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery:
Duan Jianyu's work speaks of the tension between the urban and the rural in a rapidly industrialising China, as well as the coexistence of "high" world art histories and "low" global popular culture. Her work weaves its own obscure narratives, juxtaposing trivial everyday objects with motifs from the Eastern and Western canons of art. She tempers a sublime romantic yearning for the past and the pastoral with touches and irony and farce, through absurd situations and a painting style which avoids virtuoso gestures in favour of a homely warmth and modesty. In her own words, "I love secretly describing the details of life, apparently rationally and politely, calming them with fakes, falsities and untruths".
This exhibition includes the large painting, Muse and Museum, which she made during a two month residency in Nantes, France, 2011 at The Frac des Pays de la Loire. This painting is an excursion in the idyl of the international art residency, which offers up the seduc- tion of other cultures and art histories. Duan Jianyu responds by placing 'the museum' and 'the muse' in a nourishing and fertile landscape.
While this work highlights the attraction of travel, Duan Jianyu's paintings also tackle the flip side of this new freedom of movement, which is the sense of rootlessness that comes from mass migration. The theme of 'home' and family is introduced in the form of characters such as 'sisters, mothers, and mother's sisters and mother's cousins'. Indeed, in Chinese there is no differentiation between the word for home as place or family.
Sigrid Holmwood's work focuses on the ways in which the hand-making of materials generates meaning and resists the alienation of industrialised life. This has involved researching Western art historical recipes and how they intertwine with the image and construction of identity.
Last year, Sigrid spent two months in China extending this research to the Eastern tradition, especially noted for being the birthplace of paper making. Preparations for this trip included learning the Western adaptation of paper making techniques, as well as asking the team at Vitamin Creative Space to plant Chinese Indigo to be ready for harvest upon her arrival. During her stay in China, Holmwood travelled to the village of WuMu in the remote Yulong mountains in the far southwestern province of Yunnan, where she stayed with two shamans of the ethnic minority Naxi people.
The Naxi practice their own unique religion, Dongba, which has its roots in animism and Tibetan Lamaism. The shamans must record their scriptures using their own pictographic script and on paper which they make themselves from local plants. It was this sympathetic magical relationship between the local plants, the act of hand-making, and the world of ideas that provided the inspiration for this exhibition. This was reinforced by her discovery that every Chinese dye plant she investigated was also used in traditional Chinese medicine.
Her new works are painted on paper handmade by the artist and coloured with these Chinese plant dyes that are all traditional medicines. The paint she uses follows tradi- tional Eastern techniques, binders and pigments, including earth collected in WuMu and the indigo grown by Vitamin Creative Space.
This is Duan Jianyu's first exhibition in London and will be exhibited at the same time as Sigrid Holmwood's. Even though their approach to their work is different, Duan Jianyu's and Sigrid Holmwood's philosophy has the same affinity, hence the one title "Cousins".
