“I wanted to paint all the places I stayed in so I could remember them well.”
Born Shenyang, Liaoning, 1984
For Daily Scenes, Dong Yuan made 42 separate paintings, of the view from every window in the stairwells of her six-storey apartment building. These everyday scenes are utterly ordinary: “crowded buildings and sad little patches of ground with a few random trees”. Their appearance results from use, not aesthetics. But for most of her neighbours, who never go to galleries or museums, these are the only “artworks” they see. By reproducing them with meticulous care, she gives even these mundane scenes a kind of beauty.
Dong Yuan has never been daunted by big tasks: for her Home of Paintings she completed 59 canvases; and Sketch of Family Belongings took 186 of them. Both works record, one or two items at a time, the entire contents of two small apartments she lived in as a student. As with the views of Daily Scenes, others might have done this with a cell phone or digital camera, but “I like the traditional way of painting,” she says.
