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CAI DONGDONG

Cai Dongdong was born in Tianshui in the Chinese province of Gansu in 1978 and studied at the Beijing Film Academy. He works primarily with photography, installation, and video, focusing his practice on the complex cultural issues behind the medium. From the perspective of visual culture, Cai Dongdong introduces photography into the realm of image history and cartographic history, addressing questions such as the representation of representation and the power structures inscribed in ways of seeing.

Cai Dongdong understands photography not as a flat image but as an object in space. He cuts, rotates, and expands photographic prints and combines them with materials such as wood, glass, and stone as well as mirrors, lenses, and cameras, creating expansive photo installations. As a counter-movement to the flood of digital images, Cai Dongdong uses analog processes and emphasizes materiality, surface, and traces of time. Through precise interventions and transformations of historical photographs, he questions how photography shapes collective memory in society as a tool of ideology and exposes the illusion of history conveyed by photographs.