Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

CUI Jie (b. 1983, Shanghai) graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, China Academy of Art. She lives and works in Shanghai. Cui’s practice pays close attention to the development of public space. By applying the two-dimensional language of painting to the study of urban architecture and public sculpture, she endeavors to reflect upon the mechanism and evolution of China’s urbanization process as well as its accompanying influence.

Ying ZHOU is an architect and assistant professor at the Department of Architecture at Hong Kong University. She focuses on the evolution of street space in Shanghai and has published Urban Loopholes - Creative Alliances for Spatial Production in Shanghai’s City Center in 2017. Her research interest on the relationship of contemporary urban developments, the growth of cultural industries/new economies and their institutional frameworks in East Asian cities developed from her work with Kees Christiaanse at the Singapore-ETH Gentre’s Future Cities Lab and with Herzog & de Meuron at the ETH Studio Basel. She has published in Critical Planning, Urban China. Frieze, Leap, and exhibited at the Rotterdam Biennale, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Swiss Architecture Museum, amongst others. Born in Shanghai, Ying holds a B.S.E. from Princeton, a M.Arch. from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and a Ph.D from the ETHZ. She practiced and taught in New York, Shanghai, Detroit, Boston, Basel and Hong Kong.

崔洁，1983年生于上海，毕业于中国美术学院油画系，现工作、生活于上海。她对公共空间的发展和演化保持着密切关注，以反思中国城市化进程的机制、演变及其所带来的影响，致力于运用平面绘画语言对城市建筑与公共雕塑进行研究。

周颖博士是一位建筑师也是香港大学的助理教授。她一直在关注上海建筑街区尺度的城市演变，在2017出版了 《城中之隙:上海城市中心地带空间发展中的创意性合作》的新书。她对文化产业发展和全球化知识交流的研究来源于与和新加坡-苏黎世工大未来城市实验室(FCL) Kees Christiaanse教授的合作及和苏黎世工大巴塞尔工作室(Studio Basel) Herzog & de Meuron教授的合作。周颖生于上海， 有普林斯顿建筑与工程学院本科学位，哈佛大学设计研究生院硕士学位，苏黎世工大博士学位。她在纽约、上海、底特律、波士顿、巴塞尔和香港从事过实践和教学工作。

In conjunction with the exhibition An Opera for Animals, this artist talk features Zhou Yin, professor of architecture department at the Hong Kong University, coming together with artist Cui Jie for an interactive discussion on her previous solo shows and recent artworks. The conversation will focus on how the fast pace of modern life and the large-scale architecture in the cities have transformed people’s perception of space.

Since the Chinese Economic Reform (1978), buildings of different architectural styles have been introduced in China during a period of rapid urbanization and marketization. However, some of the local architects duplicated characteristics with a certain misunderstanding and distortion of the forms that nevertheless eventually make cities look “modern”. Based on her continuous study of the architectural landscape in the three cities in which she has lived (Shanghai, where she was born and grew up; Hangzhou, where she attended the National Art Academy, and Beijing, where she previously lived and worked), her works present architectures and public sculptures that embody a mix of traditions and geometric imaginations of Chinese cityscapes.

In Escape, Cui Jie revisits the structure of the Honglou Hotel in Hangzhou and the traditional crane symbol that recurs in her paintings. The architectural forms that the artist portrays in this work are designed in the Japanese Metabolist style. Mixing amalgamated and superimposed imagery with a modernist imagination of the crane sculpture - a symbol from traditional Chinese imagery- and interjected with abnormal data glitches common in 3D modeling, Cui Jie tries to create an urban Chinese landscape which is at the same time broken and solid.

Cui Jie paints as a resident of the city and as a participant of the contemporary society; while she questions the system of urban planning, she continues researching the relationship between sculpture and city’s architecture.

崔洁以城市的体验者和时代的亲历者之身份进入创作，不断思考着城市建筑和雕塑的关系，以及它们背后的生产机制。自改革开放以来，随着城市化和市场化的飞速发展，各种不同的建筑风格开始进入中国。然而，部分本土建筑师虽然复制了那些风格特点，却存在一定的误解，城市“现代”的外观下最终充满了形式的迂回和曲解。崔洁对自己生活过的三座城市（出生地上海、求学地杭州和曾定居地北京）的建筑景观展开持续研究，通过作品呈现了各种建筑和公共雕塑，体现出中国城市景观中传统与几何想象的糅合与混搭。

在展出作品《逃逸》中，崔洁重新描绘了她在绘画中持续回访的杭州红楼大酒店和仙鹤造型。这座建筑的外形临摹自日本新陈代谢派，将兼具传统中国意象和现代主义抽象形态的仙鹤雕塑与3D建模软件中因数据异常所形成的模型破碎合于一体，构成一种既碎裂又坚固的现代中国图景。

本次艺术家对谈中我们邀请到崔洁及香港大学建筑学系副教授周颖，二人将共同探讨崔洁过去的两个个展以及当下正在进行的艺术创作，并从她们各自的视角分享现代城市的高速度和大尺度对于人们的空间感知所产生的变化和思考。