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Lot Essay
Painted in 2017, Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building features Cui Jie’s signature multi-angled landscape composition in her brilliant use of one-point perspective. Capturing Cui’s first-hand experience and fascination with various architectural patterns, her paintings are not merely collage-like schematisation of architectural elements, but footprints of geographical misplacement resulting from the rapidly changing urban landscape of China over the past 30 years. The pictorial plane of the present work is congested with sharp geometric planes, slicing lines that allude to detailed architectural sketches and towering rectilinear forms. As the title suggests, a constructivist-style building anchored in the middle of nowhere is the long-distance telecom hub building in Kunming City, intertwining by a segmented metallic spiral overpass that appears transmitted from another dimension. The smooth surfaces and organic structures populated in the present work offer a distinctive sci-fi quality, owing to Cui’s close observation of the overflow of architectural prototypes that have been hastily appropriated across different Chinese cities as a paradigm of modernisation, in particular Japanese Metabolism. ‘By culling eclectically from these influences, the artist condenses these prototypes into a “structure of feeling” that documents the evolution of spatial forms and the history of differentiation,’ curator Jiawei Yuen asserts (J. Yuen, Cui Jie: Lines of Flight between Surface and Model, LEAP Magazine, Dec 2019).
In Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building, Cui focuses on the telecom infrastructure that plays a pivotal role in China’s ‘reform and opening-up’ policy as the essential avenue to facilitate the globalised network flows through data transmission, alongside commercial structures that attract external capital. Such urban development eventually leading major Chinese cities towards a homogeneous state and commanding the everyday lives of ordinary people, especially those of middle-class. Through dynamic flowing lines and biology-inspired tropes, Cui attempts to interrupt the suppressive constraints imposed on individuals by the rigid regulations and networks of the cities. Tempered by the stolid technical drawings, the seemingly speculative future city rendered in Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building is meticulously constructed yet emotionally charged. All the joint elements –some realistic and some imaginary—are derived from the artist’s direct experience as a citizen walking around the cities in China. Born in 1983 in Shanghai, Cui Jie is one of the ‘Post-80s’ generation artists that grew up witnessing the drastic transformation of cityscapes in China following the ‘reform and opening-up’ period. Cui delineates views of the urban environment thus represent the past and present and that prefigure the future. Graduated from the prestigious Department of Oil Painting at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Cui first received international attention at the 4th Prague Biennale in 2009, and has since been included in major local and international exhibitions. Her works sit in numerous public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai and Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
In Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building, Cui focuses on the telecom infrastructure that plays a pivotal role in China’s ‘reform and opening-up’ policy as the essential avenue to facilitate the globalised network flows through data transmission, alongside commercial structures that attract external capital. Such urban development eventually leading major Chinese cities towards a homogeneous state and commanding the everyday lives of ordinary people, especially those of middle-class. Through dynamic flowing lines and biology-inspired tropes, Cui attempts to interrupt the suppressive constraints imposed on individuals by the rigid regulations and networks of the cities. Tempered by the stolid technical drawings, the seemingly speculative future city rendered in Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building is meticulously constructed yet emotionally charged. All the joint elements –some realistic and some imaginary—are derived from the artist’s direct experience as a citizen walking around the cities in China. Born in 1983 in Shanghai, Cui Jie is one of the ‘Post-80s’ generation artists that grew up witnessing the drastic transformation of cityscapes in China following the ‘reform and opening-up’ period. Cui delineates views of the urban environment thus represent the past and present and that prefigure the future. Graduated from the prestigious Department of Oil Painting at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Cui first received international attention at the 4th Prague Biennale in 2009, and has since been included in major local and international exhibitions. Her works sit in numerous public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai and Rubell Family Collection, Miami.