北方剧场：乌鸦的臼齿
Northern Theater：Molar teeth of crows
Northern Theater："The Crow's Molars" is a 10-year photography film project that collectes works made by Cui every time when he returned to his hometown in Dongbei (the most nothern district of China).
Birds travels from south to north regularly. Each trip to Dongbei is like ‘a long migration”, during which Cui never stop rethinking questions of space and identity of himself. A large number of people flooded into Dongbei from the Republic of China to 80s, while left their “short-lived hometown” when the prosperity of Northeast China gradually disintegrated after the 1990s. Cui is one of them, he was so eager and finally escaped to the welthy south during the migration wave. The longer time that being seperated from Dongbei, the more Cui could understand Dongbei spirit and accept his identity.
To break the stereotype of Dongbei photography, Cui offers a personal calm observation and photographs in rough black-and-white tone to create a spiritual presence in a poetic way, rather than to present a sad elegy or an objective investigation. The elements that reveal the detail of time and place are deliberately removed, the viewer can only recognize where it seems to be a town, where it seems to be a country or wilderness. The new and the old Donebei are deconstructed, and the boundaries start to blur.
This project aims to present Dongbei in a more vigourous way and break its stereotype - a cold, rough, and dying industrial cities. Cui choosed to photograph daily life and photographed as metaphoric symbols. Flying birds, sculptures, memorial ceremony, footprints, and thick smoke from nowhere, in these daily fragments, what reverberates between those images is not only nostalgia, but also a kind of retrospect of identity recognition. People thought Dongbei, as cradles of comedy cultural, is full of joy, but only Cui witnesses its long silence.
In this process, Cui kept going back and forth between the identity of a outlander and a native. His works present a state of both familiarity and strangeness. He intends to let the viewer to re-understand Dongbei in a more real and complicated way which is not a stack of symbols. Cui use of literary polysemy to create vortices in his works. It is not only an introspection, but also contains questions about what shapes us, and how we will recognize and shape the world.