Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project
Cui Jie: Species as Gifts
10 November 2023 - 25 February 2024 | Gallery 0
The Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project is set to unveil a joint curation titled “Species as Gifts” by the artist Cui Jie. As the first art project in Gallery 0 of the West Bund Museum primarily focused on painting, Cui Jie brings her recent field investigation of local parks into the creation of new sceneries through over a dozen new paintings. She delves into the successive transformations of architecture, sculpture, and ecology in the city of Shanghai, along with their associated histories and memories. Within this context, animals, plants, and gardens exchanged between nations or cities act as “gifts” that are transformed into mobile assets. The concept of the garden also evolves from being the property of the state or private individuals to becoming an open public space, which over time acquires a broader meaning as a place of recreation and nurturing, in response to evolving social needs and changing aesthetics. The exhibition will be open to the public for free, from November 10, 2023, to February 25, 2024.
As a highly representative contemporary Chinese artist, Cui Jie’s artistic practice in painting combines different layers of reality and fantasy, aiming to explore heterogeneous perspectives in various fields and geographic backgrounds. When depicting specific cities, buildings, structures, and landscapes, she delves into embedded historical perspectives and skillfully presents multidimensional meanings of distance, angles, and time.
崔洁，瓷器吻鹅和上海航天大楼，200 × 160 cm，2023
This exhibition follows upon Cui Jie’s passion for urban planning, regional research, and landscape sculpture. In its design, she draws inspiration from the landscape planning of Shanghai Dong’an Park and introduces a new way of viewing paintings infused with the ideals of Eastern impressionism found in Asian gardens. The artworks are presented as elements of garden design, akin to the arrangement of props, and they come to life together with the wall fabric modeled after Dunhuang brocade from the 1960s, ultimately forming part of the virtual landscape.
Gardens themselves combine engineering and artistic techniques, and their designers strive to carve out a utopian oasis amidst the hustle and bustle, elevated roads, and towering buildings of the city. The aim is to create a temporary natural environment that in the words of Cui Jie, “appears as if it were created by the heavens, even though it is man-made.” The interplay between human civilization and nature has always been a significant theme in Cui Jie’s work. In the well delineated compositions that are polished and lucid, landmarks like Changfeng Park, the Cathay Cinema, and the large-scaled porcelain in the shape of kissing geese… these seemingly familiar scenes are being woven into abstract patterns reminiscent of railway tracks and constitute balanced records and observations of the interactions among human creation, nature, social-political dynamics, and historical change.
崔洁，瓷器吻鹅和上海衡山电影院，200 × 150cm，2023
Focusing on local contemporary art practices from an international perspective is one of the West Bund Museum’s cultural perspectives. Cui Jie recently initiated the “Shanghai Garden” project in the museum’s outdoor space. As a playful experiment that blurs the boundaries between art and daily life, the artist opened a vegetable garden next to the museum and conducted a two-month planting project, sharing the fruits of art in the soil with the audience through stories or actual planting. Cui Jie’s solo exhibition “Species as Gifts” breaks through traditional mediums to bring a fresh perspective and direction to Gallery 0 of the West Bund Museum. Since its opening, Gallery 0 has invited young artists of note, such as Chen Wei, Nabuqi, Hu Xiaoyuan, and Yao Qingmei, to experiment with site-specific works, continuously presenting various possibilities that go beyond conventions and gradually forming a pioneering character and interactive exploration. Gallery 0 of the West Bund Museum will continue to provide an open platform for local artists while offering the audience a refreshing avant-garde landscape, inspiring a deeper artistic perception.
崔洁，上海植物园，250 × 180 cm，2023
About the Artist
Cui Jie (b. 1983 Shanghai, China) creates paintings which explore the heterogeneous perspectives in various fields and geopolitical contexts by incorporating diverse layers. For the artist, the cities she depicts in her works are closely associated with her personal history: one can identify influences as vast as Bauhaus principles, ideologies of Chinese propaganda art, Soviet communist aesthetics, or the Japanese Metabolism architectural movement, among others.
Cui Jie’s major work People’s Square was exhibited at Art Basel’s Unlimited in 2022. Her work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Thermal Landscpaes, Pilar Corrias, London (2023); New Model Village, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2022); Cui Jie: From Pavilion to Space Station, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2019-20); The Peak Tower, Pilar Corrias, London (2019); To Make a Good Chair, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019); The Enormous Space, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2018).
Her work has been included in group shows including Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle (2023); OCAT, Shanghai (2022); Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2021); Para Site, Hong Kong (2021); 12th Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2020); Guangdong Time Muse- um, Guangdong (2018); MoMa PS1, New York (2017); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017).
上海动物园1，65 × 184 × 75 cm，2023
上海植物园，65 × 184 × 75 cm，2023