Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 31, 2021: Cui Jie, an emerging Chinese artist (#1458)

Friday, December 31, 2021

Artist of the Day, December 31, 2021: Cui Jie, an emerging Chinese artist (#1458)

Cui Jie (1983) is a Chinese artist who specializes in oil painting and 3-D printed sculpture. Cui's body of work is largely characterized by her play with space and dimensionality, which take shape in her geometric imaginings of Chinese cityscapes. The most common subjects of her works are models of Chinese cultural landmarks of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Shanghai Bank Tower, which are either already or soon-to-be demolished. These towering structures are often surrounded by organic, swirling shapes to place them in a constant state of motion and transition, yet a 'sinofuturistic' context which both revives and reinvents their initial purposes.

Cui Jie was born in Shanghai, China. In 2006, she graduated from China Academy of Art Oil Painting Department. She currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Cui Jie is described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the youngest "China's Rising Art Stars." She has been named one of Phaidon Press's leading painters in its publication, Vitamin P3, and she is profiled in the December/January 2015 issue of Surface Magazine.

Cui's early works questioned the truth in reality through the unconventional combination of images on canvas, a multi-perspective approach which she associates with Orson Welles. Later, in groups of new paintings, she shifted her style from the previous one to the study of forms and figure-ground relationship. In these paintings, she pays much attention to and magnifies the architectural details of structures, buildings and landscape, using the idea of fragments and layers so as to convey a sense of alienation. To reach their dream-like state, her scenes employ huoshaoyun (literally, 'fire clouds') and similar non-naturalistic environments, fusing both time and space.

Her classical training is reflected most apparently in her most recent exhibitions, which merge a variety of architectural styles to create fantastical, futuristic images of urban Chinese metropolises. Cui's blending of forms and emphasis on unity emerge from conceptions of the ideal in Chinese history. The theme of Chinese industry and the role of the worker, for instance, appears in her repeated subjects of government buildings, extending her works into the realm of political commentary on Mao era socialism, nationalism, and collectivist propaganda while also speaking to contemporary building practices of rapid urbanization: the razing of village and suburban communities to erect residential and commercial districts. As a result, many of her works obscure the delineation between utopian and dystopian landscapes, questioning upgrade culture and contemporary practices of cultural preservation.

Cui has stated that she views architecture as "experiencing history just as human beings;" interviews quote her artistic focus as an expansion on Wassily Kandinsky's synesthetic style of painting, visualizing sound itself and other sensuous experiences as part of the urban landscape. Cui Jie's work has been attributed to influences ranging from Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, International, Surrealism, and Japanese Metabolism aesthetics. Her art directly recalls such perspectives in the 1959 Ten Great Buildings project in Beijing which followed the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, which were based in such architectural styles to reinvent China in the vision of Mao Zedong.

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