Cui Jie

Cui Jie was born in 1983 in Shanghai, China. She graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2006, then moved to Beijing to begin her practice; galleries and museums today describe her as based in Beijing, Shanghai, or both. Her paintings and drawings focus on Chinese urban architecture, elevated roadways, telecommunications towers, government buildings, and the retrofuturist forms of Cold War-era and post-1980s Chinese modernization, often built up from photographic source material and drafting-style line work.

Early recognition included a Silver Prize at the Zhejiang Province Oil Painting Exhibition in Ningbo in 2005 and solo exhibitions at Leo Xu Projects in Shanghai in 2012 and 2014. In 2015 she undertook a residency in Jaffa, Israel, with the Tiroche DeLeon Collection and Leo Xu Projects. The Wall Street Journal named her among China's Rising Art Stars in 2012, and she was included in Phaidon's Vitamin P3 survey of contemporary painters. Her work appeared in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2017 and the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial in 2018, alongside a solo exhibition, The Enormous Space, at OCAT Shenzhen the same year.

Her profile grew further with Inbox: Cui Jie, a focused presentation at the Museum of Modern Art that ran from 2020 to 2021, which included a painting MoMA acquired that year. In 2023 she presented Species as Gifts at Shanghai's West Bund Museum, staged through its collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, and Thermal Landscapes, a solo show at Pilar Corrias in London. She was included in the Singapore Biennale organized by the Singapore Art Museum in 2025 to 2026. She continues to work and exhibit actively.

Critical attention has followed Cui Jie's rise from a China Academy of Art graduate to a name recognized by international institutions. The Wall Street Journal identified her as one of China's Rising Art Stars in 2012, and Phaidon later included her in Vitamin P3, its survey of significant contemporary painters. Her presentation at the Museum of Modern Art has been cited as evidence of her standing among the post-1980s generation of Chinese artists, and reviewers consistently return to her central subject: the elevated highways, towers, and retrofitted socialist-era buildings of Chinese cities, painted with a drafting-like precision that reads as both documentary and speculative.

Cui Jie's auction market remains small relative to her institutional standing, and precise sales data remains incomplete in public auction databases. The highest documented price located is HKD 2,898,000 (about USD 372,000) for Untitled (ARP11-A), reported through Christie's Hong Kong, though the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available public records. Also documented is S House #5, which sold for HKD 889,000 (about USD 114,000) through Phillips Hong Kong. Her results to date have come through Hong Kong sales at Phillips, Christie's, and Sotheby's, a pattern consistent with an artist whose reputation has so far been built primarily through museum and gallery channels rather than deep secondary-market activity.

Cui Jie's secondary market is thin: only a small number of lots have come to auction, all in Hong Kong, and prices to date have been modest by international contemporary art standards. Her institutional base, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rubell Family Collection, is unusually deep for an artist at this stage of her auction history, and is the strongest available signal of long-term standing. No catalogue raisonne exists for her work, so collectors should rely on the two galleries most closely associated with her, Antenna Space and Pilar Corrias, for provenance and context. Buyers should also take care with the name itself: a separate, unrelated Chinese artist, born 1976, is also known as Cui Jie, and auction and gallery records should be checked against the 1983 Shanghai birth year to confirm attribution.