Cai Dongdong – Passing By Beijing

I am previously familiar with Berlin-based Chinese artist Cai Dongdong through his interest in re-purposing vernacular photography. A Game of Photos and Left Right, his previous two books present a playful atmosphere of interrogating the past, playing with the physical artifacts of the photographic medium. In some ways, with A Game of Photos, one is reminded of Thomas Sauvin’s artist book Xian, though with less physicality. Dongdong’s physical interference with the images is reserved mainly for the pictures. Although A Game of Photos is quite playful, the intention is not to use the book as a play tool itself (primarily) but instead to show his gracious and often humorous reworking of physical images. Left Right considers the physicality of reading these types of images, but in a dual tome rendering between right and left viewing, almost simulating, with a little effort, a DJ type of mixing of images. They never overlap, but one can read the images simultaneously. Within the project’s conceptual framework, there is a discussion about Twentieth Century Chinese history.

With his new book Passing by Beijing (2024), the artist turned his gaze to his archive of photographs over the past twenty years without a specific emphasis, outside of the images reflecting the incredible shift in the Chinese cultural and economic landscapes. These topics are subservient to his image-making but are not without their place in the mix. Images of culture, labor, and architecture inform the frames and questions about Beijing’s urban and rural environments, pervading the topics. As an archival gesture, the work positively breeds beauty.

The editorial selections are tight, emphasizing keeping the retrieved photographs’ color palettes similar. There is an aquamarine cast to many of the pictures, giving them a feeling of being locked in a jade atmosphere. Televisions, fires, light leaks, and glares also inform the viewer. These elements, such as labor, transport, and agriculture, are also pertinent to the work. Hints of glamorous city life offset these images, and the push and pull between rural and urban becomes more and more defined. If anything, I suggest that the book is about change, however tectonic.

The suggestion of change reflects the artist within the editorial process. It is always a slightly different venture to rummage through the archive than constructing a body of work from within its making. The constant pressure of working on a shorter-term project often shadows every ambition. With archive rummaging projects, there is an emphasis on how one looks at their work from a great deal of lived experience that has passed. Many of us who make photographs, art, etc., are less fond of our earliest creations. It is a time of experimentation with style, not knowing precisely what tropes define us or asking us to get involved.

This is a free period of experimentation, but it almost always closes with a fixity of sorts, a knowledge of self and how one makes images. This makes looking back at two decades of image-making more cerebral, less ambitious perhaps, and less about specificity. What defines these projects instead is how we piece together our fragments for a new audience, unburden once-hidden photos, and combine them to suggest a working example of our work. It can be equally freeing when one has already made some acclaim with other work and projects to let go and find some motivation for dabbling in the past.

What I find most seductive about Passing by Beijing is Dongdong’s consistent eye and, as mentioned earlier, his particular eye for analog color, the blue cast that many of the photographs entertain. There is something seductive about them and the cavalier way in which many different subject matters all fit under one roof, or in this case, two covers. It has been an incredible experience to go through the artist’s world, and whereas, as a collector of vernacular photographs myself, I like his other work, this, for me, lacks the same artifice needed to conduct the experiments that he does with the other work. Instead, there is something almost unassuming, lacking artifice, or bother here that I can endorse wholeheartedly.

I very much want to see more. It also feels much more personal. I cannot explain precisely how, but it has to do without having to think too much through what I see. I can set down the other work’s conceptual games and focus on Dongdong, the photographer. I believe there is much more room for that side of his practice to come through shortly, and this book is my wholehearted endorsement. Get a copy before it is impossible.

Cai Dongdong

Passing By Beijing

Self-Published

 

 

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