Cui Jie

    BIOGRAPHY

    Cui Jie, born in 1983, currently lives and works in Shanghai. The modernization, the development of city landscape and the unified and tedious style of contemporary architecture has always been one of the topics being discussed in Cui’s paintings of cities. Connecting and intertwining visions of the past and the present under her brushstrokes, Cui Jie expresses her nostalgia for the past and a seemingly utopian exploration for the future landscape, and hence evokes the viewer’s collective nostalgia.

    Cui Jie graduated from China Academy of Art. She has been included in Phaidon Press’s publication Vitamin P3. Her work has been featured in Para Site, Hong Kong (2021); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); X Museum, Beijing (2020); Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (solo; 2019); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2019); Tai Kwun Contemporary Art Museum, Hong Kong (2019); Pilar Corrias, London (solo; 2019); Antenna Space, Shanghai (solo; 2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2019); OCAT, Shenzhen, China (solo; 2018); Centre Pompidou & Mao Jihong Arts Foundation, Chengdu (2018); Guangdong Time Museum, Guangzhou (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2017); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, Ireland (solo; 2016); CASS Sculpture Foundation, Chichester, UK (2016); chi K11 art museum, Shanghai; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai (solo; 2014); Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma, US (2014). Cui Jie’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, among others

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    • Gates to the City: Cui Jie | Owen Hatherley

       
      Looking at the work of Cui Jie from a northern European perspective, the first error is probably to think you’re seeing some form of lament for a modernist past. That narrative is fairly familiar now, based on a longing for the largest-scale remnants of the material culture of postwar social democracy or state socialism—the buildings they left behind to be inhabited or ruined under neoliberalism.

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    • Cui Jie: Lines of Flight between Surface and Model | Yuan Jiawei

       
      Amid a wave of postmodernism, this full-fledged approach of developing and utilizing the value-in-exchange of symbols caused a breach in creative barriers between art and architecture, and cast light on the way in which modernism captured pure form. In particular reference to urban construction and development, the interchangeability of the identity of artist and architect is instrumental in pushing the notion of space towards a dimension verging on democracy. In this vein, Cui Jie, an artist who came of age in the 1980s and 90s, shows a keen grasp on the various architectural patterns that have had a profound effect on the rapid renewal and expansion process of Chinese cities, and is adept at selectively harking back to these precedents of modernization in her painting and sculptural practice, thus triggering a momentary sense of the immediate future. The architect’s psyche reflected in her work goes beyond a mere collage-like schematization of architectural elements. Instead, her works are predicated on a technical enthusiasm for the city’s “autonomous surface” (hereafter referred to as the “epidermis”) and a pattern recognition of geographical misplacement or anachorism.

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    • Rearviews & Mirrors: Architecture, idealism and anachronism in the work of Cui Jie | Zhou Ying

       
      Representations of the future always look dated as soon as the future itself arrives. Part of China’s post-1980s generation, the artist Cui Jie makes paintings that continually confound our sense of time in their seeming nostalgia for the future. Set against a metallic sky and often floating above a similarly reflective gridded ground, Cui’s technically exquisite renderings of built forms not only capture a specific typology of urban China’s modernist artefacts; together with her more recent sculptures, they scrutinize the veracity of modernism as an ideology claiming the future. To the artist, who did a residency last year in Tel Aviv, the flawless International Style of the white city is appealing but not all that ‘interesting’. What compels her is precisely the opposite: the seemingly arbitrary, erratic and often jarring juxtaposition of an appropriated modernism against a context that is, in itself, rapidly shifting. Reconstructed amidst the chaos of China’s urban transition, the pristine, future-facing forms of Western modernism read as anachronisms.

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