ZHAO DUAN

Zhao Duan is a contemporary artist whose practice centers on the structural relationship between body, breath, and drawing. For her, painting is not merely the production of images but an embodied action unfolding over time.

Her significant series Corps entraînement (Synchronized Body) began during her pregnancy. Working with colored pencil on monumental sheets of paper—often spanning two to three meters in width—she developed a method of “drawing while walking.” After creating small-scale observational sketches, she transposes them onto large horizontal surfaces mounted on the wall, moving physically back and forth as she extends the line across the paper. In this process, the act of drawing becomes inseparable from bodily movement and the experience of gestation.

The continuous line records breath, duration, and transformation. What emerges is a scale that exceeds the artist’s own body, gradually forming maternal silhouettes that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. While her early work reveals influences from architectural structure and modernist composition, her recent practice embraces a more corporeal and rhythmic expression.

Zhao Duan’s works maintain compositional clarity and spatial stability, allowing them to operate both within institutional exhibition contexts and in architecturally refined private collections.