Cui Fei by Laurel Graeber

All good art has something to say, and for centuries artists have used images from nature to say it. Cui Fei draws on them too, but her work takes symbolism one step further. She harvests objects from the physical world — oak leaves, twigs and thorns — to create the appearance of calligraphy. In her canvases art is a language evoking nature, but nature is also a language evoking art.

“What I want to say is that there are messages in nature,” said Ms. Cui, whose work is in “Transplant — Transculture” at the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill, the public garden in the Bronx. “They’re kind of waiting to be discovered and read.”

This weekend Ms. Cui will help families find their own interpretations of the landscape in “Nature’s Letters,” a drop-in workshop. She will first show a short video of her work and then lead a tour through the gallery, where visitors will see her “Manuscript of Nature 1” (1999). To create that picture, Ms. Cui, who was born in China, laid oak leaves on a textured canvas in the pattern of Chinese calligraphy. She then painted over the leaves and surface with oil paint. She later peeled off the leaves, revealing their imprints. “The final image is like a stone tablet with carving,” she said.
Ms. Cui stressed that none of her images form actual characters. “It’s kind of universal to everybody,” she said of her symbolic language. “Nobody can read it, but everyone can recognize it.”
Ms. Cui will help children gather leaves, grass and twigs to glue on poster boards. “I want them to use found objects to make a collage,” she said. The messages, though, are up to the young artist-authors’ fertile imaginations.

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