Cui Xiuwen Observes One Day in 2004
Pauline Doutreluingne
Cui Xiuwen, One day in 2004, n�3. Digital photography, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Marella Arte Contemporanea gallery.
A little Chinese girl, dressed in a white robe and a red scarf, wanders along the red walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing. A young girl feels the loneliness and sadness of growing up too fast. These are the subjects of Beijing-based artist Cui Xiuwen.
In her latest series of works Xiuwen combines oil painting, digital photography and video. She has been exploring these three mediums since she began her professional career in 1996, but this is the first time she really blends them into one series of works, where each medium is used as a different language to express a unified set of ideas.
As a young female artist in rapidly developing China, she has been exploring issues concerning sexual abuse and sexual awareness in society. In her new series "One day in 2004," Cui Xiuwen continues to observe society and herself as one of its players. Only now, she has a different perspective.
In 2003 she finished a work called Sanjie which was inspired by The last Supper of Leonardo Da Vinci, wherein she replaced each of the apostles with the same character reappearing in the latest body of works. A story began. After finishing Sanjie, she knew that she had to continue recounting the spiritual journey of the little wandering Chinese girl. Through her canvasses, photographs and videos, we can see one girl, two girls, piles and heaps of "that" girl, stacked up in a single frame, like stills from a video collaged into one photograph set in the ancient architectural frame of the Forbidden City. She is dressed in a white robe (a colour of dreams) and a red scarf, a vivid symbol of the years under the Mao-regime, which link her present to a past recorded in collective memory; she has wounds, scratches on her body, and a hurt, lonely, maybe confused look in her eyes. One moment she is looking upwards to the bright blue sky of Beijing, thinking about how she could realize her unfulfilled dreams (One day in 2004, n�3); another moment she is getting lost in tens, hundreds, even a million reproductions of herself, dispersed in the absolute time of an average day.
Cui Xiuwen commented that the series is partly autobiographical and partly the result of her observations of society, of all the girls and woman that she sees in her environment. But one cannot help wonder if it is an allegory of contemporary China, and all that one has to cope with as its citizen, including its collective memory, the pressure of everyday life and traces of its history while growing up rapidly?
It is interesting to know that as a child, Cui Xiuwen wanted to be a reporter, and that she thought that art would be too difficult. Today Cui Xiuwen is an avid observer. As a reporter searching the surroundings, she writes articles in a newspaper. She uses her paintings, photographs and videos to express what the world and that little girl are telling her.
On March 28 Cui Xiuwen?s first solo show is featured as the opening event for the new venue of the Italian gallery, Marella Arte Contemporanea, in Dashanzi Art District, Beijing.
