Cui Fei was born in 1970 in Jinan, Shandong Province. After graduating from the China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, she moved to the United States in 1996 and has been resident there ever since.

Although painting was the primary focus in the first decade of her career, Cui Fei began to create works using materials from the natural world in the mid-1990s and this was soon to become the distinguishing feature of her artistic practice. She has described how the experience of being a Chinese artist in the United States and witnessing radical changes in China led to a heightened awareness of the relationship between man and nature that has been lost. “I see nature,” she has said, “as consistent and ordered, thus providing a therapeutic agent for healing and harmony in an otherwise chaotic world. I utilize materials found in nature such as tendrils, leaves and thorns composing a manuscript symbolizing the voiceless messages in nature that are waiting to be discovered and to be heard.”