Unlike the other photograph artist, Cai Dongdong in recent years has been engaged with the re-creation of secondary images, especially those old photos, that he collected through various channels. He then apply with various processing to these old pictures: including occlusions, cutting, juxtaposition, conversion, scratching and collage, to change the picture of the old narrative structure into the new one; and the daily visual experience into non daily, therefore create a surrealistic context in which a Rene Magritte kind of visual psychology is presented . Entering his work is like a crossing path made up of many different leads, and the path leads to a mysterious garden, which is filled with fragments of time and memory to be polished and tiled.

 

Cai Dongdong’s surgical-like approaches to the old photographs: the combination of transplant of slices, or the change of texture and materiality of the image – are reflected in the obsession of the artist to play with the ideas of shifting perspectives and the interchangeability of non-connected visual realities, through the use of the found material and object. However, unlike the conventional way of the appropriation of found object, which has been a common practice in contemporary art, there are great number of manual craftsmanship involved in the re-processing of second-hand images and objects in Cai Dondong’s works. In this sense they are almost similar to the classical mean of production of art. Even though his work appears with a contemporary form and is endowed with contemporary ideas and concepts, however, they still manage to retain the sense of tangibility and the touch of human temperature, which has become increasingly scarce in the production of contemporary art today, and that is the very core value of Cai Dondong’s work.

Wei Xing,Beijing