Cui Jie

In this exhibition, jointly curated by the Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Cui Jie 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.

This exhibition builds 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 civilisation and nature has always been a significant theme in Cui Jie’s work. In the well delineated compositions that are polished and lucid, seemingly familiar scenes are 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. 

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.