EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The 36 Days I Roam is a multidisciplinary art exhibition project , presenting an immersive blend of painting, Chinese calligraphy, poetic movement, and interactive performance.

This project emerged in 2022 during the artist’s creation of three limited-edition handmade artist books in traditional Chinese formats: the album, hand scroll, and folding sheet. Throughout this process, a core question emerged: What are the relationships and possibilities between pictorial imagery and the physical format of these traditional art objects?

When fully opened, these formats transform – becoming folding screens, miniature movable murals, or playful spatial installations. This realization inspired the artist to investigate further, drawing on scholar Wu Hung’s reflections in The Double Screen:

“What is a (traditional Chinese) painting? … Both kinds of scholarship approaches equate a painting with a pictorial representation… What is missing there is included in a painting’s physical form… and in all concepts and practices related to its materiality… This approach naturally breaks down the confines between image, object, and context, and provides a new ground for a historical investigation.”

The 36 Days I Roam explores these very boundaries – between image and object, between artwork and viewer. Through experimental multidisciplinary installations, Cui Jinzhe examines how visual language, installation media, and performative space can converge into a dynamic, living artwork.

Key components of the exhibition include three large-scale screen painting panel installations, sound and video elements, and, most distinctively, a 36-day live performance by the artist. Each day features a unique blend of poetic movement, vocal improvisation, live painting, calligraphy, and audience interaction – performed either in contemplative silence, accompanied by pre-recorded soundtracks, or in collaboration with live musicians.

The performance is grounded in Jinzhe’s 2024 publication, The 36 Days I Roam: A Long Poem and a Series of Paintings, a personal and poetic reflection on her travels through the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, and the mountains and temples of Lhasa. Each day’s performance draws inspiration from the corresponding text in the book, creating a time-based, evolving encounter between artist and audience.

Through this immersive project, Cui Jinzhe invites viewers into a poetic, spiritual, and deeply personal exploration – an integration of screen painting, poetry, live performance, and shared presence. This is a living exhibition that resists replication, favoring instead the raw immediacy and unpredictability of live art to provoke creativity, emotion, and human connection.

By Harcourt House Artist Run Centre

Read exhibition preview here Cui Jinzhe: The 36 Days I Roam by Lissa Robinson
Published by Preview Magazine Issues. Nov 2025 - Jan 2026

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Cui Jinzhe, whose pen name is Qiu Shi, is a painter, poet, and multidisciplinary artist who has been painting, writing and practising music since her childhood. Jinzhe was born and raised in Dalian, China, where she earned a BA (Visual Communication) at School of Arts Design from Dalian University of Foreign Languages and a MA (Mixed Media) at Dalian Polytechnic University. In 2008, Jinzhe moved to Canada to continue her studies and work as an independent artist in Edmonton. Her work explores the integration between visual art, poetry, and interdisciplinary practice, often within an interactive public context.

Jinzhe's creation mainly focuses on three themes: to observe present daily life and nature surroundings, and create paintings and texts inspired by the intuitive imagination and the inner cognition; based on diverse Chinese classical literature or ancient wisdom sutras, to create paintings and texts that combine the ancient inspiration and traditions within her personal contemporary art language; starting from painting and poetry practice, to derive a new contemplative process and artistic experience for self-realization and community transformation through live performances and the interaction with multiple disciplines and diverse audience context. Experimenting the traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy elements with skillfully rendered images and diverse, decorative elements: details from Buddhist symbols, characters in the ancient myth legend and Chinese auspicious patterns which are built and disassembled within the abstracted, accidental landscapes of ink blots and spills, Jinzhe explores how patterned, decorative elements dissolve into an ink-splashing-landscape. She is interested in constructing a unique, fantasy, and sometimes chaos world which reflects her daily contemplation on nature and life. Encountering images of characters, realistic and fantastic, within the risk of disintegration and destruction, she is examining a new painting language between traditional meditative beauty and contemporary dynamic vitality.

Jinzhe's legendary figures are at times united and at other times mutated and revealed in their transitory, shifting, and contingent forms. She often derives her painting figures into clay masks, paper puppets or wood installation to construct unique performance space in diverse context with public audience. Aspiring to benefit all beings through artistic creation, Jinzhe practices to imagine and construct a diverse artistic realm without time that integrates with the presence of contemporary life, the heritage from ancient wisdom, and the manifestation for our future.