DAVID GIBSON WRITING

All meaning begins with a mark. Whether intentional or accidental, it begins the long path from innocence to wisdom. We make or leave a mark, and then we judge its merit. Soon we add another mark, which is perhaps complementary to the first. Soon we have either a picture, or a language, or both. Whatever it is, it complicates our view of reality. Is it necessary? Absolutely. The artist is at heart a mark-maker, whether by choice or by instinct. Many artists begin their careers as painters, and then graduate to more direct forms made possible with everyday materials and with the accessibility of their implied meaning. This has been the case with Cui Xianji, whose intimate and nostalgic impressions of childhood, a life filled with innate sensation and strong personal emotions, have been transformed into a more rigorous arena for the espousal of formal and conceptual realizations. Both the making of marks and the presentation of installations have their origin in a relationship to a sen...

When we look at a photograph, chances are it will remind us of something in our own lives. We have a tendency to personalize whatever we see, to own it with our senses before judgment sweeps in and separates its essential function for us from its palpable uniqueness as an image or its utility as an expression of beauty. Photography created a world in which every thing has an internal referent to its conventional appearance, and via memory or media, to some role that we suspect has a source in intimate experience, whether as metaphor or use value. Yet much of our common experience is branded not by our memory, but by the demands of time. Every object or place has had some role not only in activities related to industry, leisure, or distraction, but once it loses its utility, is once and for all marked by time. It becomes a relic. In our culture, the relic has an especially short half-life. But the photograph reanimates the essential significance of experience itself, creating a form of...