Cai Dongdong, Passing By Beijing

JTF (just the facts): Self published in 2024 (here). Clothbound hardback with tipped in cover photograph, 8.5 x 10 inches, 172 pages, with 131 color photographs. Includes an essay by the artist. Design by Wang Lisha. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Cai Dongdong’s career has been picking up steam over the past decade, with a steady flurry of international exhibitions and monographs. As his reputation has gained increased stature in his native China and beyond, the natural temptation is to categorize him into one specialty or another, to help slot his images into the general photo conversation. But Cai’s work is not easily pigeonholed. His past projects have ranged widely, from conventional portraiture to archival curation—sifting a personal collection of found photos reputed to approach 600,000 images—to physical surface interjections to installations to photo sculptures with mirrors, shovels, knitting, and camera parts. As Cai once described his creative process, “[The photos] were piled up like chicken ribs, so I operated on them, like a surgeon.” Call him a photo doctor or simply a jack-of-all-photo-trades. In any case his output is defiantly multidisciplinary. The only through line, it seems, is creative restlessness.

Collector Daily has weighed in on a few of these works, briefly noting them in our Daybook section (here, here, and here). But until now we have not critically examined any project as a whole. His latest monograph Passing By Beijing presents an opportunity to do just that, as Cai comes squarely into our crosshairs. 

In almost every facet, Passing By Beijing represents a sea change for Cai Dongdong. For starters, it’s comprised entirely of his own pictures. The palette is new as well, a Wizard-of-Oz transformation from past monochrome projects into full color. And there are no trick mirrors or three dimensional sculptures in evidence. Instead the book presents a series of modest prints, all flat and orderly, one or two per spread, nicely centered on white pages.

Passing By Beijing’s photos literally illustrate the title, and they come across as a visual memoir of sorts. They trace a period from 2002 to 2022, a time of seismic changes for the photographer and his country, when he moved from northwest China to Beijing, and “turned from a beginner into a professional artist.” Packaged tightly into a clothbound hardback and self-published by Cai himself, this is his most personal and revealing work to date. It’s also a wonderful document of China’s capital.

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first their authorship. After a career of appropriated imagery, these first-person recordings come as a revelation. Where has this version of Cai been hiding? In plain sight, as it turns out. “I have kept a habit of carrying my camera with me every day,” he explains. “The act of shooting fills a lot of my free time.” Using a quiver of film cameras, he gradually accumulated thousands of unedited rolls, a twenty year record that he finally addressed during the pandemic. Passing By Beijing is the belated result.

The book’s initial photos survey Cai’s hometown of Tianshui, Gansu, and the surrounding region. They were taken shortly after he left the People’s Liberation Army, where he’d worked as a propaganda officer, picking up technical basics and a hunger for photographer. These early pictures peek in on Cai in his early twenties, when he was still feeling his way as an observer. The scenes show dirt-clod pastures and winding roads, spiced with a few portrait subjects. Without captions it’s hard to discern exactly, who, where, or what is being depicted. But Cai’s natural voice shines through. His framing is relaxed and inquisitive. No fancy staging, gimmicks, or lighting. Just a curious young shutterbug poking around with a 35 mm camera and normal lens (perhaps a 50 mm or comparable?).

Within a dozen photographs, the setting shifts to Beijing, where it remains for the book’s remainder. A snapshot of Chairman Mao overlooking an apple core in Tiananmen Square establishes the place and mood. If his portrait felt slightly shopworn when Cai shot it in the early 2000s, it’s even more of a timepiece now that China is an economic superpower. The hundred flowers have bloomed, and then some. 

This first brush with Beijing serves as the book’s true starting gun. Cai has just settled into the capital and spring is in the air. The next bunch of photos finds him exploring the city, photographing street scenes, buses, flowers, crowds, and friends. Gradually his new home is unveiled, both to him and to us, and something of his photo proclivities too. Some pictures seem to be plain documentary, with straight recordings of avenues and cityscapes. Others are more mysterious, for example an odd photo of a dog backlit through a bamboo blind, or a plain shovel closeup stuck in sunny wet cement (a precursor to his later shovel sculptures maybe?). An everyday street scene with an undressed woman lying prone is baffling. What’s going on here? Cai surely has some idea, but he’s happy to keep the reader guessing.

The book soon moves into summer pictures, and the subject matter expands into garden scenes, bonfires, interiors, pets, windshield views, and more. Just about anything was fair game for Cai’s camera. “Sometimes,” he explains, “out of boredom I took pictures of my own shadow, of a gust of wind, of a party, of the scenery flashing past the bus window, of a flower in bloom…” Several such subjects appear in direct examples. But alas, all blooms must fade. Summer gives way to autumn pictures, and then a final winter flurry of snowy plazas and bare trees. The seasonal cycle grounds the book’s sequence in the real world. Even if the sequence is not a strict chronology, the passing months and years provide narrative structure.  

Cai’s use of film is a subtle presence throughout, and it gradually becomes an important component. His analog palette is compressed and muted, a fitting translation of Beijing’s leaden skies, and a willful repudiation of digital photography’s expansive color gamut. The tonality entrances. After studying the photos closely we realize that what we’d initially taken for straight scans are actually reproductions of physical prints, with dog eared edges, slim drop shadows, and even the occasional full frame sprocket-holed rebate. With film, he writes “each press of the shutter seems to be driven by fate. Unalterable, undetectable, until the photo is developed, the process is full of all kinds of serendipity, as well as our expectations of the final result.” 

In several frames, those final results incorporated light leaks and color shifts, two residues of the film process which are by nature serendipitous and impossible to plan. One photo shows two men building a brick wall, divided by a vertical light leak like a bolt from the heavens. A dinner scene is bleached by overexposure into an orange dream. Birds on a tree feel the glow of a corner light leak in another frame, while a lakeside scene vanishes completely at the mid point, deleted by the end of the roll. The same leak appears several times in the same part of the frame. Perhaps other photographers would correct, crop, or edit out these images, or switch to a tighter camera. Cai’s deliberate inclusion is a nod to his process, and to a life buffeted by fateful currents.

Light leaks and happy accidents might be a metaphor for Cai’s adopted home, a city in continual flux. “With political changes,” he writes, “Beijing has always been changing its color.” He explains that when he first moved to Beijing in 2001, “the streets were empty and quiet.” Over the next few years it became increasingly crowded, noisy, and full of foreigners. Unpleasant changes perhaps, but not as inconvenient as being regularly uprooted. This was the story of Cai’s life over two decades as he was forced to move more than a dozen times, to escape the rapidly expanding city core. Each new home was a step further out, as he hugged the rural/urban fringe. “When walking through Beijing,” he writes now, “I never seem to have reached here.” 

These comments and the others above are excerpted from the book’s afterword, a nice piece of writing (translated by Ja Ru) which gives a 3-page overview of Cai’s life and general outlook. In a book with no other text or captions, the essay is a welcome inclusion. If Cai describes Beijing’s problems dispassionately and without grievance, it might be because they’re balanced by opportunity. Settling in Beijing just as the city’s art scene was exploding in the early 2000s, Cai found himself in the right place at the right time. He hopped aboard the art train and his career took off with the city’s prospects. In recent years, the Beijing scene has settled some. Passing By Beijing offers a moment to pause and reflect, and to enjoy some personal photos from Cai’s wild ride.

Collector’s POV: Cai Dongdong is represented by Stieglitz19 in Antwerp (here), M97 Gallery in Shanghai (here), Gallerie Urs Miele in Beijing and Lucerne (here), RGR in Mexico City (here), and Eli Klein in New York City (here). His work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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