CUI JIE, S House #5, 2016
Past Skin
April 6 – September 10, 2017
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens
Long Island City, NY 11101
Cui Jie will participate in the group exhibition “Past Skin” at MoMA PS1, New York, running from April 6 to September 10, 2017. In today’s technological environment, we can style, extend, and broadcast ourselves at will, projecting into digital realms that in turn shape us. The six artists in ”Past Skin” take up science historian and cyber-feminist Donna Haraway’s provocation, “Why should our body end at the skin?,” testing the growing porosity between our bodies and habitats in a contemporary world where virtuality is ubiquitous and surreality is increasingly normalized. As much as we exert influence on our bodies and surroundings, the technologies that enable this influence also influence us.
No longer simply “users” of technology, we become players renegotiating the stakes of our world, engineering natural and synthetic environments to fulfill social imperatives and emotional needs. Featuring 20 works across a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, drawing, sound, video, and virtual reality—by artists Cui Jie, Jordan Kasey, Hannah Levy, Abigail Lucien, Jillian Mayer, MSHR, and Madelon Vriesendorp, ”Past Skin” highlights works that merge figures with landscapes to examine the state of the contemporary body in and beyond nature.
“Past Skin” is organized by Jocelyn Miller, Curatorial Associate, MoMA PS1.
For more information, please see: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3832?locale=en.
CUI JIE, Shanghai Education TV Station, 2016
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cui Jie’s painting evolves from her previous expressionist take on absurdities in contemporary China to the mediation between China’s Urbanism and personal aesthetics. Inspired by Orson Welles’ multi-perspective, she applies various layers of images—some realistic, some imaginary—on canvas. Each layer comprises sculptural impastos and is meticulously executed to represent the transformation of China’s Urbanscape through time and politics. Executed with calculated and deadpan brushwork and a warm and affective palette, Cui’s landscapes and interiors make comparative studies of cities as distinctive model/laboratories of China’s open-and-reform, which also visualizes a personal history that is informed by the aesthetic madness in one time and place, for instance, the architectural confusion of Bauhaus, Chinese propaganda, Soviet communist aesthetics. In other words, Cui Jie’s painting is a time capsule that re-imagines the past and the present.
Cui Jie graduated from China Academy of Art. She has been included in Phaidon Press’s publication “Vitamin P3″ as one of the leading painters nowadays. Her works have been included in many exhibitions, among many others, “The New Normal: Art and China in 2017”, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017; “Hack Space”, chi K11 art space, Shanghai and K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, 2016; “A Beautiful Disorder”, CASS Sculpture Foundation, Chichester, 2016; “My Generation: Young Chinese Artists”, touring at Tampa Museum of Art and Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2014; “1st CAFA·FUTURE: Sub-Phenomena”, curated by Xu Bing and Alexandra Munroe, CAFA Art Museum, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 2012; “Face”, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2012; 4th Prague Biennale, 2009; “Poetic Realism: An Reinterpretation of Jiangnan – Contemporary Art from South China”, Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente, Madrid, 2008; “Notes of Conception”, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2008.
CUI JIE, Building of Cranes #4, 2015
