Antenna Space is proud to announce the participation of artist Cui Jie in the 14th Shanghai Biennale “Cosmos Cinema,” which explores how man’s relationship with the cosmos affects life on Earth. “Cosmos Cinema” presents works by more than 80 artists from China and around the world, spanning the early 20th century to the present day.

The Biennale opens to the public on November 9th, 2023. The curatorial team will be led by master curator Anton Vidokle, with core members including Xiang Zaerong, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Shanghai Biennale will host a series of offline events taking place in the city of Shanghai, as well as an online program covering a variety of formats including performances, lectures and video art exchanges.

Cui Jie’s retro-futuristic cityscapes revisit the utopian architectures of the past to reflect on the present and speculate on what is yet to come. The fantastic landscapes depicted in her carefully layered and deceptively impressionistic paintings combine elements drawn from her experience of living in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing with compositional influences ranging from avant-garde twentieth-century painting, urbanism and other visual languages.

If the grey mesh draped over Base station #2 (2020) calls to mind the digital web in which everyone on earth is now entangled, then International Space Station (2019) might suggest the extension of that grid into the cosmos. The same tension animates The Rainfall Pavilion and the Lakeside Pavilion (2019), an idyllic landscape adapted for the aesthetic enjoyment of citizens now partially obscured from the viewer.

Cui Jie’s works consider how our private and communal experience is inseparable from our built environment, and how our dreams of the future might be refined—and tempered—by attention to the past.