Background
Xiuwen Cui was born in 1970 in Heilongjiang, China.
崔岫闻
Xiuwen Cui was born in 1970 in Heilongjiang, China.
Xiuwen Cui attended the Fine Arts School of Northeast Normal University and graduated in 1990. She then went on to study at China's Central Academy of Fine Arts and received her Master's of Fine Arts in 1996.
Xiuwen Cui exhibited her work at Tate Modern, Florence Museum, Today Art Museum (Beijing), Fabien Fryns Fine Art, Eli Klein Fine Art Gallery (New York), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong), and Art Stage Singapore.
Xiuwen Cui is best known for her work Ladies' Room (2000), which was censored from being exhibited at the first Guangzhou Triennial. In her series of photographs titled Existential Emptiness (2009), a schoolgirl and her life-sized doll companion are depicted in sparse and snowy landscapes, tackling themes of adolescence, identity, and mortality.
In her Angel series, Xiuwen Cui featured a pregnant Asian woman with porcelain skin and rosy cheeks in a "virginal" white dress. Since pregnancy of young unmarried girls is considered taboo in China, this series makes social commentary about the double standards and treatment of women in China.
Most of Cui's work incorporated traditional Chinese scroll paintings, in which the natural landscape beauty is more important than the people.
Cui Xiuwen died on 1 August 2018 following a long illness.