 ui Xiuwen looks sweet and elegant, hardly the kind of appearance you expect from an avant-garde artist. And her bright, neat Beijing studio is hardly what you expect of a busy artist whose work is often considered controversial.
 At 12 P.M. one day, there are four dishes and one soup bowl on the table. After lunch, Cui Xiuwen and her two assistants turn on the radio to listen to a program featuring Chinese story-telling.
“No one would know I listen to story-telling when I am working.”Cui says with a laugh.“But when I’m working, I cannot hear anything. I drop the voice out of my mind.”
Ms. Cui, 36, has become an internationally recognized conceptual photographer and video artist. One of her most important works, a video installation called “Lady’s Room” (2002) was shown in New York City, at the International Center of Photography exhibition of Chinese video and film works. It has also been collected by the Pompidou Art Center in Paris. In 2004, she became one of the first Chinese artists to host a show her work at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London. Collectors from Europe and America pay a special attention to her. At last April’s Sotheby’s auction, Cui’s digital photo, “One Day in 2004,” which features a Chinese school girl, slightly battered, heavy with makeup and in dozens of positions, sold for about $30,000.
Her works seem to be about the struggles of a young girl growing up in Beijing – or about the rugged roles women sometimes assume in China’s rapidly evolving economy.
 Since childhood, Cui Xiuwen says she has been fascinated with the world of art. She was born in a big family in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. Both her elder brother and sister loved music and her uncle was a Suona player. She, however, fell in love with drawing as a little girl. Her brother bought her many illustrated books of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin for copy and study.
In 1988, she enrolled at Northeastern Normal University in Shenyang, in nearby Liaoning Province, where she majored in graphic design. After graduating, she taught art in a professional high school and also continued to work as an artist. But in 1994, she moved to Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which she says lead to a new direction in her artistic life.
When she completed studies at the Central Academy in 1996, she created some bold, sensitive works, such as “Rose & Watermint” (1996). Then came the “Intersection Series" (1998). In the piece, she records the full front side of a man’s naked body, revealing both heterosexual and homosexual features, and presents a nervous sexual relationship that hints at Paul Cezanne.
“I create themes about gender, not themes about sexuality,” she explains. “I focus on human beings, only the human form in the world. If you want to know what it is to be human, you have to gain an insight into the relationship between man and woman.”
 Critic Jia Fangzhou said that in Cui’s works women are presented as observers, and man is the object of her observation. The reversal shows the artist’s stance on the feminism.”
Sometimes, Cui’s work has been covered up around the “the sensitive places” to be shown at an exhibition featuring the works of graduate design students. Some years later, a magazine dared to select her “Rose & Watermint,” despite the fact that it was the same size as a matchbox. Since then, many television and fashion media outlets have come to feature her. Innumerous reports blended a “beauty artist” with her “works of sexuality” but seemed to cover the ray of her thought from her creation.
A turning point came in 1998, when she participated in a group exhibition called, “Sense & Sensibility,” which was hosted by Hong Kong’s Schoeni Gallery. She took time out to make a short trip to Hong Kong and then returned to Beijing, and went to a dance club with some women artists, and that’s when, she says, she came to realize how other women lived.
“The place seems like hell in heaven, or heaven in hell. All the women looked coquettish,” she says. “Then I brought to mind that there was one place I did not go. So I went into the lady’s room. I found all the women in the lady’s room became normal again. That is a woman’s private space. ”
She went on: “Human desire can change functions in different spaces.” Cui says she then decided to work on a piece centered on the lady’s room, but feared she had no medium to tell her story.
Oil painting was obviously not right for presenting a lapse of time and a switch of space and painting could not achieve a mission of narrating, calm.
 The problem did not upset her for long. She found what she wanted came from her experience acting in a television episode in 1998. Following the crew for several months, she had learned how to use the camera and the started to understand the language of shooting film. When the technical conditions were ripe, she tried video as her artistic medium.
“Since then, I made a decision that I would never paint,” Cui says.
In 2000, she finally had her first video installation, “Lady’s Room.” The 6 minute 12 second video record what happens one night at an upscale Beijing nightclub or disco. The video shows women in candid moments -- adjusting their bras, putting on makeup, counting money or stuffing money in their shoes and doing things most men couldn’t imagine, all in a crowded bathroom and recorded with a concealed camera.
This is what one critic wrote about “Lady’s Room”: “Lady’s is her first video and at the same time a brave attempt to open up a new path. Simple but revealing, in more than one aspect. With a hidden camera she registers the activities in a ladies room in one of the capital’s largest discotheques and at the same time she shows us how money finds its way into modern China. The toilets are a public as well as a private space, full of movement but yet intimate. There, hookers retire to catch their breath, exchange gossip, count their money and tuck it away into their shoes, panty’s or bra’s, call their next client, adjust their make-up and admire themselves in the mirror. The girls have paid big money to be able to work there.”
 Of the piece, Cui once wrote: “When young women come to the mirror, adjusting their make-up, their concentrated expressions seem to have an almost religious sensibility. The number of people and the amount of time they stand in front of the mirror are far more than ordinary. They show poker faces and never have any awareness of the existence of other people around them. But you can feel that is a situation before a battle. It seems that the ballroom outside is a battlefield.”
The showing of “Lady’s Room” at the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial was censured. That work and Zhang Huan’s performance piece, “Twelve Square Meters” led to the first lawsuit in Chinese contemporary art history. Su Jian, a teacher of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, announced that he felt sick and indignant while seeing these two works and insisted that Guangdong Art Museum, which exhibited these two works, infringed on his health. He accused the museum and required a refund of the admission fare, a public apology and a compensation for nervous shock of 20,000 RMB, or about $2,500.
The protest sparked a legal and academic controversy. Interviews from the Yangcheng Evening News in Guangzhou, a report in the Nanfang Daily, and many posts on the internet site of Sina.com turned “Lady’s Room” into a sensation.
 Zhu Qi, the critic, wrote about the controvery in his article, “The Attic of Lanaguage: Night Cases of Female Avant Garde Art. “Cui’s Lady’s Room is the representative work of the late 90s critical realism. It imitates documentary to publicize a female’s peer to a nightclub, reflecting a spot of young women who offer sexual transaction in metropolis in the period of China social transition,” he wrote.
Cui created in succession many video works, “TOOT” (2001), and “Subway” (2003). After 2003, she created and photographed the character of a girl of many conspicuous symbols of the 1970s, such as white shirt, red scarf, skirt with a tartan pattern, round jet black hair. The images were connected to the artist’s self-reflection on the female.
In“Sanjie” (2003), an imitation of The Last Supper and “One Day in 2004, the young school girl character is replicated and juxtaposed, and the cloned girls shows up with various implicit gestures with an expression that does not match her age, before real scenes of historical, political memories, such as red walls of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. “I want to express female’s process of growing up.” Cui says, “I put adult mentality on a teenage girl, I think that what the girl bears is as much as a woman’s growth and buildup.”
A female model wrapped in newspapers and plastic is situated at a corner of Cui’s studio. The slim upper half sculpture without a head or arms has a large abdomen. “It is a part of my new work.” Cui says proudly. “I am doing a new series of things, a series of little pregnant women. I will try photography, installation and video.” A 13-year-old, little pregnant girl with round cropped hair and wearing a white shirt and red scarf? This October, Cui will bring her latest series that might arouse another disputation to an exhibition traveling to Nanjing and Beijing.
“Wait and see,” she smiles, hinting that she’ll keep people guessing.
translated by Wei Ying
Related Link(s):
·New Works from Cui Xiuwen
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