An outstanding example of her skyscraper studies, Cui Jie’s China Telecom Building 3 works from a real building, closely observed, only to break it down with incredible formal and artistic ingenuity. At its centre is the Pudong International Information Port, from Cui’s native Shanghai: its details are impeccably reproduced, but its side is given an impossible silver gleam, so intense it resembles the retro utopian fantasies of the Space Age. This is produced by her stencilled black spray paint, which outside it leaves a matrix-like grid pattern. Vague architectural outlines and suspended shapes add to the impression that the painting has been rendered on a computer, but crashed to reveal the skeleton beneath - even, as the childlike swathes of paint on the sides show, Cui has made it completely by hand.
The present lot alongside its inspiration: Pudong International Information Port, Shanghai, completed in 2001 by Nikken Sekkei Ltd.
Image: Copyright © 2011-2024 Huitu.com.This approach is especially fitting for one of several telecom buildings Cui has painted (along with, among others, the International Space Station and the MI6 headquarters in London), which reduce the world to a series of digital networks while relying on physical resources. It also combats a tendency in Chinese architecture towards bland identikit edifices with no individual distinction, built through imported styles such as German Bauhaus and Russian Brutalism (or, in this building’s case, a Japanese firm).
To reintroduce a more personal touch, she roots her paintings in personal observation, starting with her walks around whatever city she is based in: ‘Sometimes I stop to look at the colours of the buildings or to intentionally listen to the noises on the streets…I often walk past different plazas where a statue stands at the centre. When you walk closer to it, the statue blends into the building in the distance, at which moment the surfaces of the building and the statue merge together by light, turning each part into another.' i As this indicates, she prefers to envision cities as organic, with different elements always moving and merging: one of her favourite buildings is the now-demolished Nakagin Capsule Tower, where each replaceable room could do those very things.
This drive for individual expression and formal barrier-breaking is rooted in Cui’s own time and place, yet it finds a parallel in one of her artistic idols. Decades earlier, Sigmar Polke had been attempting to make his own personal mark against oppressive cultural aesthetics, in his case the joint threats of Soviet austerity and western mass-culture consumerism: his Stadtbild paintings disrupt monotone cityscapes with explosive bursts of colour, sometimes pushed right through the canvas. Besides obvious similarities, Cui shows the same eagerness to blow up overfamiliar forms, icons, and aesthetic practices, feeding them into a unique, ever-surprising artistic vision.
Born in 1983 and a graduate of the prestigious China Academy of Art, Cui’s rise to international art-world prominence has only gained momentum in recent years: 2023 saw her enter the Museum of Modern Art in New York, participate in both the 14th Shanghai Biennale and a solo exhibition at the West Bund Museum (Cui Jie: Species as Gifts, 10 November 2023 – 25 February 2024), and set her new auction record with another telecom building work: Kunming Long-distance Telecom Hub Building, sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for 1.197 million HKD. Her work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, X Museum in Beijing, and Asia Society in New York, and been collected by Centre Pompidou and the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.
i Cui Jie in conversation with Phaidon, 23 November 2016, online.
Condition Report
Description
View our Conditions of Sale.
Provenance
Metro Pictures, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Ж31
China Telecom Building 3
signed and dated 'Cui Jie [in Chinese and Pinyin] 2019' on the reverse.
acrylic and spray paint on canvas
250 x 210 cm. (98 3/8 x 82 5/8 in.)
Painted in 2019.
Estimate
HK$600,000 - 800,000
€69,400-92,500
$76,900-103,000
Kimberley Wong
Associate Specialist
20th Century & Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
+852 2318 2095
kimberleywong@phillips.com
New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art
Hong Kong Auction 4 October 2024