A preteen girl stands on a snaking black highway overpass clutching her pregnant belly. Her hands are cramped in nervous positions of fear. Behind her lies mob of doppelgangers, each contorting in anxiety and distress. Their budding girlish nipples are visible through the translucent white of their identical dresses, giving the tableau a disturbingly sexualized hue beyond the fact of her adolescent body swollen with child. The face of this girl is that of a child. she does not fully understand her predicament, she is not in control of her body or the world around her, she is both alone in the world, and at the same time, she is legion. The road on which she stands is thoroughly modern, while in the distance, the red walls of traditional Chinese architecture hint of time and place that is rapidly receding into the past as she, and the only world she knows, is hurtling towards an amorphous and uncertain future. The girl, in all her myriad replications, is the symbolic centre of Angel, Chinese contemporary artist Cui xiuwen's latest series of photography works, and this new series expands and deepens the line of inquiry present in her larger body of work.

　　since the mid-90s Cui xiuwen's multidisciplinary practice has consistently engaged themes of sexuality and gender, the tension between childhood innocence and complicit adulthood, the blurred boundary between self-formation and history. she has used a wide range of media and subject matter to explore these themes, bringing her visually luminous insight to bear on this array of conceptual investigations.

　　As a member of the 70s generation of Chinese contemporary artist, Cui xiuwen stands out as one of the pioneering women making her mark internationally. Although she collaborated with other well-known women artists in the mid-90s,she has defied attempts by the media to pigeonhole her as a "pretty woman artist", or an artist dealing primarily with " women's issues". Since the late 90s,her works have been exhibited in top galleries and museums, such as the Tate Modern, Pompidou, Florence Museum and PS1, as well as in major exhibitions such as the Guangzhou Triennial, Prague Biennial, and others.

　　Among Cui xiuwen's most impressive credentials is the versatility of her practice and serious conceptual preoccupations that inform her visually arresting work. While her oil paintings, with their frank depictions of the sex act (considered quite scandalous during the mid-90s),and sometimes violent expressions of aggression, launched her rising star, it was her path-breaking video art piece, lady's, which brought her work into its global orbit.

　　lady's examines the private behaviour of Chinese " lady's of the night"- karaoke sanpei xiaojie - changing their clothes, adjusting their breasts, freshening their make-up, making deals on their cell phones, and seeking respite from their rambunctious "guests", in the space of the "lady's room" at a karaoke bar. The "lady's room " is a space that defies unambiguous categorisation. Meditating on gender and power in this limbo space between public and private, Cui xiuwen filmed prostitutes coming and going, without their knowledge or consent, through the tiny lens of a camera concealed in her clothing, adding a layer of implication about how their "privacy" is ultimately illusory, and eliciting debate about the ethical implications of such an art practice.

　　The women she secretly filmed are euphemised in china as "Misses" ( xiaojie),yet the practical status of these women the almost-frantic acquisitive impulse, and the rise of standards that measure success and worth in material terms. In this space that is simultaneously private and yet public, the connections between gender inequalities and paradoxes of power are writ large. We are voyeurs onto the mundane rituals of money-making pre­parations as these woman attempt to overcome their poverty, lack of education or general lack of advantages (the vast majority of such women come from poor rural backgrounds) by turning their own flesh into capital. Yet while these women attempt to gain autonomy through the money their trade buys them, their strategies replicate the objectifying, demeaning social values that contribute to their lack of opportunities in the first place.

　　The blurring of public-private space is also the dominant theme in her video Subway 2, where Cui Xiuwen secretly films a woman sitting across from her on the subway picking dead skin off her chapped lips. The woman, completely absorbed in her private grooming, shows how the subway, like so many such sites, becomes “a public space of private necessity.”

　　Cui Xiuwen’s first series of photography works, entitled Chengcheng and Beibei (common names for Chinese boys and girls), caused such an uproar that their exhibition was cancelled, echoing the controversy around photographer Sally Mann’s candid depictions of her own children’s sexuality. Shooting stills of her friend’s young son and daughter playing naked and acting out their infantile sexuality, Cui Xiuwen sought to capture the ways in which children acquire and express sexual and gendered identities. Interestingly, it was the Western media that found the shots more disturbing than many local Chinese, who grew up in an environment where children wear “split-pants” that show their naked bottoms, allowing them to squat and urinate in public, and where the arrival of a male child often involves displaying his genitalia with much fanfare.

　　Following this controversial exploration, Cui Xiuwen began to cultivate her craft with the camera. The series of works that resulted was titled Sanjie (2003), which refers to the Buddhist idea of three spheres – the human sphere, the earthly sphere, and the heavenly sphere. Working with a nine-year-old model in schoolgirl garb to enact the various poses in The Last Supper, Cui Xiuwen asked the girl to rely on her own understanding of the traditional work and re-enact it based on her own interpretation, rather than telling the girl how she should act out the scene. She felt that allowing an innocent, unspoiled child portray such a complex set of adult human interactions would offer an interesting reinterpretation of that classic piece.

　　She followed Sanjie with One Day in 2004, a com­posite series of oil painting, photography and video, invoking childhood in yet another, equally disturbing way. One Day in 2004 builds on Sanjie, featuring the same little girl in a schoolgirl’s uniform typical of the period of the 50s through to the 70s in China, replete with a Young Pioneer’s red neckerchief. The pieces all invoke questions of history and memory, both collective and personal, which have been silenced or rendered unspeakable in the post-89 era. In her own writings about the work, Cui Xiuwen explains that the white shirt represents youthful innocence. The red neckerchief bespeaks both idealistic passion and bloodshed. Indeed, the little girl is covered with bruises, abrasions, cuts and scrapes. Her wounds are not, merely physical, however. It is the forlorn, lost expression in her eyes, as she walks alone by a red wall, or sits slumped on the ground, half-heartedly playing.

　　In Sanjie, the little girl plays the part of Jesus and the disciples. “People always ask which one is Judas,” Cui Xiuwen writes. “I tell them Judas is all of us.” Like a visual rhetorical question, collective responsi­bility for history is the backdrop against which the One Day in 2004 series makes its statement, just as red walls invoking Tiananmen Square and architecture of Chinese political power provide the backdrop for many of these works. She asks, rhetorically, why it is that we cannot view this particular edifice – so steeped in the significance vested in this site by the actions and ideals that were staged and squelched there – like any other building.

　　Regarding her choice of a child as the central figure in many of her works, she makes it clear that she is not offering a narrative about the trials of any particular girl. “I am making the innocence of childhood into a point, eliding the process of growing up.” Through the elaborate scenes she stages, she makes this iconic “little girl bear the weight of the consequences of history…” How do we feel about this question when confronted with the graphic depiction of how that weight leaves its marks on the body of symbolic innocence? How do we stand in relation to what we see?

　　Cui Xiuwen’s latest work extends and deepens these themes with the series Angel, which depicts a pregnant preteen girl in her in postures of longing, distress, anxiety and repose. Not only is the question of the tension between childhood innocence and adult responsibility present in this new series, the metaphor of labour and birth are also visually embodied in Angel as well. The pregnant body of a preteen girl provides a signifier for her investigation into the psychological and existential anxieties of the era about the future. This is not the story of a specific young girl who’s gotten herself in trouble, rather, this is the narrative of the psychological insecurities and uncertainties of a nation in the process of giving birth to a new order.

　　Carrying the symbolic weight of a general abstraction, the young girl shows us her consternation and con­fusion. She seems not to fully understand her predi­cament, does not know how she got into this state or where it all will lead. Replicated into legions of images, she populates highways with traditional Chinese architecture behind her and an open road before her, leading where we do not know. In overwhelmed exhaustion, or perhaps feigned sleep, she lies supine, a horizon full of construction in the background, and a tear hovering in the corner of her eye. Aside from the visual impact of a pregnant preteen girl, the power in these works lies in Cui Xiuwen’s subtle rendering of this delicate, confusing condition of expectations about the unknowable future that is rapidly and sometimes painfully coming to fruition.

　　Text by Maya Kovskaya