Juice Cui

About

Embracing, Unravelling, and Smashing the Fantasy (2025) is a sound art installation featuring nine characteristic mask flutes and four DIY instruments, accompanied by a one-hour quadraphonic sonic experience. The work reinterprets nine well-known Western fairytales and Eastern folktales, offering an audio-driven journey that subverts nostalgic perceptions of these stories. It invites the audience to reflect on and uncover new meanings within the tales they encountered in childhood. It also encourages collective participation—inviting the audience to form a temporary ensemble and perform together.

These fairytales—The Deer of Nine Colours, Hua Mulan, The Magic Flute, The Nutcracker, The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, Pinocchio, and The Nightingale and the Rose—respectively represent compassion, valour, enlightenment, imagination, sacrifice, obsession, curiosity, transformation, and devotion in human nature. Together, they form a rich tapestry of cultural diversity, moral insight, and philosophical depth, rooted in their original contexts.

Clay, with its fragile and earthy nature, plays a central role in the work, symbolizing both vulnerability and transformation. One of the clay mask flutes was unfortunately smashed during the display; when I spliced the fragments together, it became an act of reconstruction—of reimagining rather than repairing. This gesture of breaking and remaking underscores the work’s central provocation: that fairytales are not immutable, but living cultural forms, always capable of being reshaped.

Inspired by “Je ne veux pas que la vie se mette à avoir d’autres volontés que les miennes” by Simone de Beauvoir, Dasseinzumtode (2025) is an extended performative version of Embracing, Unravelling, and Smashing the Fantasy (2025), is a contemporary dance performance that reconstructs the endings of fairytales, using sonic world-building as its core methodology.

The speculative experience unfolds like a deciphering game. The audience follows in the footsteps of the wizard, played by Juice, repeatedly turning “the wheel of fate” and entering the Six Paths of Reincarnation. The Three Good Paths are: Heaven (Tiān 道), Human (Rén 道), and Asura (Āxiūluó 道). The Three Evil Paths are: Hell (Dìyù 道), Hungry Ghost (Èguǐ 道), and Animal (Chùshēng 道). 

Within these realms, the audience encounters fairytale characters who have been reborn. Though they may still carry memories of their previous fates or archetypes, they are no longer flat archetypes. They have become multidimensional, vivid—like us, grounded in reality. Each character ultimately discovers their true self and moves, with awareness, toward death or alive.