Cui Jie 崔洁

Urban environments sit at the crux of Cui Jie’s practice. Her paintings and drawings depict specific buildings or sites, unlocking their historical, societal, and political resonance. Cui speaks of her interest in the overlap between collective and personal geographies of the city, with her paintings being a meeting point for these spatial experiences to collide. Often employing divergent painterly styles onto the same canvas, Cui’s works host a magnetic mix of precise architectural drawings, dreamy washes of colour and emulated digital glitches. All at once otherworldly and familiar, these paintings are grounded in architectural specificity whilst layering and traversing diverse influences, histories, and geo-political contexts. Cui cites the importance of Bauhaus principles upon her practice, as well as unravelling the ideology of Chinese Propoganda art, Soviet communist aesthetics and responding to the Japanese Metabolism architectural movement.