CUI YUXUAN 

Documentary Photography, Place, Journey

  1. Puppet Manchukuo: Echoes in the Layers of Time
  2. Divided Spaces, Dissolved Orders
  3. Deconstruct the “Tools” 
  4. Lost, Lost, Lost  失，失，失
  5. I’ve Never Heard a Swan Song

Space, Narrative, Installation

  1. What you will  第十二夜
  2. Love Me Tender, Bite Me True 
  3. Trespass 飞（非）地烟花
  4. 溯流 Go Upstream
  5. Jiakong, Jiakong 
  6. -Borderline as Storyline- 

Object, Text, Life, Act on Instinct  
  1. 言之凿凿 As if It's Carved in Stone
  2. Cleaning as Method  
 Info/Bio

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©2024 Cui Yuxuan


Puppet Manchukuo: Echoes in the Layers of Time (2020-2021)



The artist perceives Changchun today through private and aesthetic lens, where remnants of Manchukuo seamlessly integrate into daily life. A desolate shrine becomes a playground for military families, while overgrown areas near temples evoke reflections on youth and family bonds. At Jimmu Temple, a former Bushido training ground now hosts a community stage and cinema, bustling with elderly residents amidst poetic decay. These everyday scenes intricately intertwine with Changchun's colonial past, prompting the artist to capture the unacknowledged and contested hybridity inherent in these spaces.

Through photography, the artist seeks to encapsulate these profound intersections of past and present, to narrate Changchun's evolving identity and her journey of connection. Each image speaks to the layered complexities of memory, resilience, and ever-shifting narratives within the city - a visual exploration of history's enduring echoes in the present landscape.



Lost, Lost, Lost (2022)



"Lost" has many meanings in English: lost track, disappeared, missing, bewildered, confused, immersed, addicted... Each layer of meaning resonated with our situation at the time. We hope to present an experience of being lost and finding one's way again, of the constantly extended waiting, and of two "outsiders" intimately and intuitively exploring the post-socialist landscape.



So far, So close (ongoing)



During the three-month residency, I’m reorganizing and reinterpreting these old postcards I collected in a Kringloop shop in Rotterdam half a year ago, about a North Korean revolutionary opera called The Song of Mount Kumgang. Landscape is omnipresent, dominating our lives. I see sacred landscapes, promises that could never be fulfilled, and cursed absent people.