Welcome to the opening on 11.7.2024 from 5pm-7pm!
Guided tour on Thursday 15th June 6pm and 8pm.
In early 2020, amidst the urban landscape of Changchun, once the capital of “Manchukuo,” (Manchukuo, Japanese puppet state in Northeast China from 1932 to 1945) the artist Yuxuan Cui’s accidental discovery near home reignited a deep exploration of hidden relics from the colonial era.
Based on field research combined with archival research and folk imagery, Cui uncovered a city meticulously planned under Japanese colonial planning, but now navigating a complex and prolonged process of decolonization. Government buildings and commercial centers, repurposed over time by new powers and capital, coexist with obscured ruins and temples transformed by ideology, and sculptures fractured by public discourse. These sites, filled with fading traces, serve as vessels reshaped by collective memory – a cyclical overlay of history.
Cui perceives Changchun today through a personal 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, Cui 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.
Yuxuan Cui (b.1999, Jilin, China) is a visual artist and storyteller currently living and working in the Netherlands. Yuxuan holds a BA from School of Foreign Studies & School of Arts, Nanjing University, and obtains her MA Fine Arts at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU).
Her work extensively combines photography, video installation, archives, semi-fictional text, and participatory experience. These narratives reside in the interstice between fiction, documentary, and investigative research. Stemming from individual life experiences, she employs a feminine perspective and poetic language to narrate the transformations of identity amidst geographical migration and varied relationships. She delves into the intricate geopolitical dynamics of marginal areas and the political and historical remains therein. Committed to making the invisible visible, the clear ambiguous, and the solid flexible, she endeavors to utilize bodily perception and border-crossing movement as subtle interventions in society, responding to the pervasive power micro-techniques within history and memory.
