Ladies Room (2000)

Cui Xiuwen, (1967-2018) is best known for her work "Ladies' Room" (2000). For this work, Cui hid a spy camera inside the ladies' bathroom of a popular Beijing karaoke club, recording conversations and candid moments of local call girls getting ready for clients. Cui here captured another hidden reality of contemporary China, and thus contributed, like her male colleagues mentioned above, to a kind of artistic compendium of the two decades of unprecedented change in China, a period with social effects often blurring the limits between reality and fiction, between reason and insanity.