CUI YUXUAN 

Hauntology, Mourning, Land Melancholy

  1. Vestige of Hsinking, After the Illusion Fades 迷梦幻灭后
  2. Divided Spaces, Dissolved Orders
  3. Deconstruct the “Tools”
  4. Lost, Lost, Lost  失，失，失
  5. Wuchang五常, Wuchang无常
  6. I’ve Never Heard the Swan Song 我从未听过天鹅挽歌
  7. Deferred Echoes Inside the Bell
  8. Drawn in Captivity: Walking through H.J.D de Fremery’s sketches 囚中途绘

Space, Storytelling, Installation

  1. What you will  第十二夜
  2. Love Me Tender, Bite Me True 
  3. Trespass 飞（非）地烟花
  4. 溯流 Go Upstream
  5. Jiakong, Jiakong 
  6. -Borderline as Storyline- 

Info/Bio

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©2026 Cui Yuxuan

2024
Mixed-media installation (photography, poetic text, and translucent acrylic panels)
This project began with an unexpected encounter with the bodies of dead waterfowl in a river near a residential neighbourhood in Rotterdam. Over the following weeks, several more deceased birds appeared along the same waterway, raising questions about the fragile coexistence of urban environments and non-human life, and what happens to an animal's body after death within a city.

Through photography, field research, and installation, the project traces the relationships between birds and the spaces they inhabit, from urban waterways and wetlands to natural history museums. Moving between living habitats and preserved specimens, it examines how non-human lives are observed, managed, classified, and remembered, and how a living creature becomes a body to be removed, a specimen to be preserved, or an image to be viewed.

Combining documentary observation with poetic and fictional narratives, the work explores the boundaries between nature and the built environment, life and death, presence and absence. Waterfowl, darkness, ghostly presences, and dystopian imaginaries form a shifting visual language through which the familiar urban landscape becomes strange and uncertain.

Rather than simply documenting the deaths of birds, I've Never Heard the Swan Song reflects on the ways humans perceive, coexist with, and attempt to preserve non-human life. It considers what remains after a life disappears, and what may be lost in the very act of recording, naming, and preserving it.









               

         







                 



   







           
















           






                     
                 









               




                            





Installation View