Duan Jianyu Art Chicken No.12

NARRATOR:
Artist Duan Jianyu painted a roast chicken against the natural landscape of Guilin, China. Inserting something like that into a typical Chinese landscape painting may look as absurd as it sounds, but chickens have been a recurring subject in Duan’s paintings since 2003. Here, she explains why.

DUAN JIANYU:
People’s lives have changed a great deal since 2000. These changes are all-encompassing, reflected as much in the global economy as in our everyday lives.

I think this work, Art Chicken, can be understood on various levels. First of all, chicken is a typical food that we Cantonese people eat. It corresponds to life’s mundane and trivial nature. Secondly, the word ‘chicken’ is a Cantonese euphemism for sex workers. You know, there was a time in the art scene when, after more than a decade of flourishing development in Chinese contemporary art, artists were getting more and more obsessed with every exhibition opportunity and the chance to be rich and famous.

To me, chickens are rulebreakers. They basically just like to spend their days running around. In a way, that reflects my mind. There’s a part of me that refuses to conform, likes messing around and tries to break the air of elegance that everybody is trying to maintain.

Layering a chicken with something as mundane as Guilin’s landscape has generated a kind of image that no one has ever seen before. This encourages the imagination of the viewer to run wild. With this painting, I wanted to create a dream-like state with a tone of absurdity.

NARRATOR:

Art Chicken No. 12, created in 2004 by Duan Jianyu, is a horizontal oil painting on canvas measuring about 182 centimetres high and 217 centimetres wide. In the painting, a big chicken is suspended upside down from a coconut tree against a background of mountain ranges under a cloudy sky.

The coconut tree is on the left of the painting and has a height of about three-quarters of the work. Its thin trunk, painted grey, bends towards the right. At the top of the tree, nine frond leaves and ten round coconuts are outlined with simple brushstrokes in different shades of green. The leaves fan out and droop downwards. They have jagged edges and are paler in parts where the paint looks thin and dry.

A big chicken hangs upside down from the coconut tree, its right foot tied to the tip of a frond, its body nearly touching the ground. Plump and yellowish-brown, the chicken is almost as big as the tree itself. It has no hair, no head, and no claws. The follicles on its skin make it look like roast chicken.

The sky in the background is pale blue mixed with a touch of light yellow. Beneath it, a range of rolling mountains come in varying shades of black and light grey, undulating with steep inclines and declines. The mountains in the foreground are dark and dim, while those further away look brighter. At the foot of the mountains are thick strokes of black paint on the right and greyish-white on the left, creating the impression of a land surface or a lake.