Cui Jinzhe’s exhibition Om ~ Ah ~ Home：Healing Space for Body & Mind, is a poetic journey of finding grounding between the two worlds Jinzhe calls home: Dalian, China, and Edmonton, Alberta. Her work takes the form of three bodies of work, including a painting series, an interactive screen panel installation, and a kinetic mixed media and ceramics sculpture.

Using Chinese ink painting techniques in the Home painting series, Jinzhe depicts human and animal-like beings intermingling within surreal, dreamy landscapes. In each painting, Jinzhe creates a fantastical “home” for each of her chosen subjects, such as Nymph, Seniors, Ocean, Love, Flowing, Farmers, Playground, etc. As significant elements of Jinzhe’s conception of “world”, she offers them a sacred and beguiling space to exist both physically and spiritually.

With titles like Heart Sutra, Enlightenment, Dependent Rising, Cui Jinzhe has created sanctuaries for visitors to her panel installations. Exploring the 2-dimensional pictorial relationships within traditional Chinese screen paintings, Jinzhe expands the space through the addition of physical objects that viewers can interact with to enrichen the contemplative and mindful experience.

The third work is a spinning ceramic and calligraphic sculpture called Om~ Ah~ Home! The clay figures reference the shamanic culture of Jinzhe’ s Manchu heritage while the masks are informed by traditional dance of the Baima people of Tibet. Importantly, this work mirrors the cyclical nature of life, like being anchored through the rhythm and flow of time.

Through this luminary work, Cui Jinzhe seeks to connect us all to her wondrous and evocative cosmos.

By Wendy Peart, the Curator of Om ~ Ah ~ Home : Healing Space for Body & Mind at McMullen Gallery

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 Chinese ink painting, calligraphy writing, and interdisciplinary practice, often within an interactive public context.

Jinzhe's creation mainly focuses on the following three directions: First, to observe and reflect on the present daily life and surroundings, and then create visual images and texts inspired by the inner reverie and intuitive imagination generated by her solitude and cognization . Two, based on Chinese classical literature or ancient wisdom sutras, integrate the perception and experience of her individual's current life, and create paintings and texts that combine ancient traditions and contemporary culture and art form. Third, starting from painting and poetry practice, through experimentation and the interaction with multiple disciplines and diverse audience context, to derive a new contemplative process and artistic experience for community development and public art genre.

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 is passionate on imagining and constructing diverse worlds combined with a sense of the familiar as well as the surprising, a yearning for antient times as well as the aspiration for future.