Something in the Air: Yafeng Duan

I experience nature in every moment.
Birds leave their traces on the snow.
Branches move together with the wind.
The sky changes its colours at sunset.
Birds sometimes chirp softly at dusk.
The morning air smells of earth and sky.
Rain clouds move quickly in the wind and let their threads flow downward.

I feel the different seasons strongly and how living beings change under their influence.
I like experiencing nature with my nose, ears, hands and skin.
I want to perceive what we cannot see with our eyes.

- Yafeng Duan, 2026

Gow Langsford is pleased to present a new body of work by Yafeng Duan, bringing together recent and newly developed paintings created between 2022 and 2025. This series emerges in the wake of a transformative 20-day visit to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2024, when Duan celebrated her inaugural exhibition with the gallery. The experience has left a lasting imprint on her perception of colour, atmosphere and natural phenomena, shaping works in which colour moves beyond description to become something felt and embodied.

Duan’s paintings emerge from a luminous palette, combining layered washes across expansive canvases with fluid paint runs and sudden intensities of colour. Based in Berlin, her practice carries echoes of Abstract Expressionism, however it is equally informed by the refined sensibilities of her Chinese heritage, with her father being a key figure in Chinese state calligraphy art. These influences converge in paintings that feel both grounded and atmospheric, held in a quiet balance where gesture, tone and contrast take precedence over image or illusionary depth.  

What is immediately evident is that Duan’s engagement with colour is central to her paintings. Her time in Aotearoa brought a heightened sensitivity to shifting light and atmosphere, particularly within the sky; with purples mixing into soft greys, pinks that tended towards oranges. Duan recalls a particular memory of a soft pink cloud suspended alone in the sky, which for her became the form of the Fenghuang (凤凰) – a mythical bird from Chinese legend. Fleeting yet resonant, the moment stayed with Duan, something at once intimate and ungraspable, sacred and of incredible beauty.

Across these works, colour operates in this expanded way, carrying atmosphere, memory and energy. These colours draw Duan in, a way to perceive landscapes that speaks to the essence of a felt interconnectivity to the world around her. The paintings themselves resist fixed interpretation – while they may suggest traces of gardens, plants, skies, clouds and even swans, these associations remain open, arising through the viewer’s perception rather than being prescribed. What emerges instead in an experiential field – one that invites a slower, more attentive mode of looking.

Time spent with the works recalls Duan’s painting process, with each work in the exhibition developed slowly, sometimes spanning multiple years. Duan returns time and time again to her compositions, allowing layers to accumulate until each painting feels fully ready to emerge. White recurs as both ground and illumination, creating space, light and a subtle sense of stillness – instilling a quiet spiritual presence within each composition.

Each painting holds a distinct atmosphere. New hues appear alongside familiar ones, creating an expanded chromatic language that captures fleeting impressions of sky, fog, rain and the vibrancy of life itself.  Maintained throughout the exhibition is Duan’s use of blues, purples and pinks with poetic titles such as A Little Spring, Morning After Rain or Where Water Finds Its Way. Yet, The Ease of Evening introduces an uncommon use of red. Duan states that to her this red is calm and expansive, radiating quietly outward from the centre of the painting and balanced by soft pinks and peaches. A Quiet Lushness contains something of symbiosis, the forms and colours existing like different forms within an ecosystem, diverse and lush.

In these works, the process of painting – waiting, layering, revisiting – is inseparable from the finished image. The resulting canvases are lustrous meditations: abstract, emotive and deeply personal. Through them, Duan invites us to witness the translation of perception into paint, the fleeting into the eternal and the seen into the felt. Colour is not simply seen – it is experienced, inhaled and carried into the body.

Text by Madi Macdonald