“I wanted to paint all the places I stayed in so I could remember them well.”

Born: Shenyang, Liaoning province, 1984. Lives and works in Beijing

The two one-room apartments look like regular student digs, though by Chinese standards they are relatively large and well furnished. There are a bed, shelves filled with books, vases of limp flowers, a jug and thermos, a computer and a teddy-bear, and, on the walls, pasted-up study notes and a still-life painting. But with the exception of a folding chair and some paint tubes, every item in both these apartments is itself a still-life painting. Dong Yuan’s Home of Paintings comprises 59 separate canvases; Sketch of Family Belongings has 186 of them. Both works were done to memorialise the places the artist passed through in 2008. Her fellow students might have done this with a cell phone or digital camera, but “I like the traditional way of painting,” she says. The pictures are astoundingly detailed, down to a door knob and a row of power plugs, and their placement in the three dimensions of four-walled rooms prompts double-takes. Giving many of her subjects uniform beige backgrounds and placing the canvases edge-on to the viewer further stresses the tensions between painted and real. And it simultaneously echoes and departs from the approach of traditional scroll painters, who did not use single-point perspective. More recently, Dong Yuan has shifted her attention outward, painting the grimy urban views from every floor of a multi-storey apartment building.