Yuxuan Cui
Fine Arts

Cooperation scholarship：
Funded by the Mondriaan Fund

Yuxuan Cui (b.1999, Changchun, China) is a visual artist and storyteller currently based in Rotterdam, NL. Yuxuan holds a BA from School of Foreign Studies & School of Arts, Nanjing University, and obtains a MA in Fine Arts at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). Working primarily with photography and moving images, Yuxuan’s practice moves between fiction, documentary, and artistic research.

Her work examines how geopolitics, historical memory, and colonial legacies are inscribed in peripheral and transitional landscapes. Through field-based research and embodied engagement, she approaches archives not as static repositories but as sites that are continuously activated and reinterpreted. By intervening in both physical locations and archival materials, her work seeks to reveal what is often overlooked or suppressed, destabilizing fixed narratives and allowing meanings to remain open, ambiguous, and flexible across fragmented temporalities and terrains.

She has participated in residencies at Brutus Lab (2024), Het Wilde Weten (2024), and the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2022). Her work has been exhibited at Waterliniemuseum Fort bij Vechten (2024), Kunsthal Gent (2024), the Limburg Biennial at Marres House for Contemporary Culture (2024), BAK (2023), Nanjing Art Fair International (2023), Pingyao International Photography Festival (2023), and Miami New Media Festival (2022). In 2025, she received grants from the Mondriaan Fund, CBK Rotterdam, and the One Way Street Foundation, Sailor Project.

During her residency at Villa Kamogawa, Yuxuan will investigate Japanese Buddhist architecture as a transnational and colonial infrastructure in East Asia. Centering on Higashi Honganji in Kyoto, her research will trace the afterlives of colonial-era religious sites in Northeast China and Shanghai. Through moving images, photography, archives, and spatial installation, she will explore how sacred spaces shift in function and meaning across histories of religion, colonial power, and modernity.