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Cai Dongdong
Born in 1978 in Tianshu, China, lives in Beijing, China
Pick the fruits, 2017
Archival Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta 325g, punched, acrylic mirror
45 x 45 cm
Edition: 50 (12 EA)
signed, numbered on sticker with accompanying certificate
During his time in the People’s Liberation Army, Cai Dongdong, despite his lack of experience, was deployed as a portrait photographer. And photography has remained his art’s essential means of expression. He takes up the traumatic legacy of China’s cultural revolution, particularly as concerns the political indoctrination of the young, whose education was namely reduced to physical and productive labor.
Cai has no wish to shoot even more photos but avails himself of the pool of historical photographs and his own commissioned works. These he dissects in a search for “hidden” contents and then defamiliarizes them with inserted objects. Frequently these are mirrors, by which he engenders different effects and meanings. For example, he holds the same images up to the pictured protagonists so they can reflect on their own conduct. Another time he draws the viewers themselves into the goings-on. This brings it all into the present and adds a further level: a reckoning with contemporary art production and its mechanisms.
The model for our current edition, “Pick the Fruits”, that is being issued in collaboration with the Society for German-Chinese Cultural Exchange, is extracted from a series called “Fountain” that Cai Dongdong published in 2015 to accompany an exhibition in New York and also as a book. The title is a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous key work of the same name in the form of a commercially available urinal. It continues to exist characteristically only as a photo document and stands as a paradigm for the innate equivocation of things and their reception, which are subject to manipulation.
Works by this artist at international exhibitions in Germany can be seen, among other places, in the much discussed show “Working on History: Contemporary Chinese Photography and the Cultural Revolution” at the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin in 2018.
