In the early years, Cai Dongdong began to study photography in the army, specializing in portraits for soldiers, and shooting troops training. When he returned to Beijing to become a photography artist, he made subversive reflections on photography. For a long time, he used old photos collected from waste recycling to make ready-made products. Cai Dongdong called himself "the editor of the image." He regarded the picture as a pure object and a tangible place, continually excavating the hidden dramatic structure, reconstructing our perception of the image by means of teasing, grafting, and induction. Experience.

In the works on display, he combined the gelatin silver print photography of the sea he photographed at Shanhaiguan with the ancient pottery jars fro the Han Dynasty. In historical time, Shanhaiguan is the boundary between the Central Plain and the foreign civilization, between the world of the known and the unknown. This piece of the enriched sea is rolled up and filled the two thousand year old clay pots. This seemingly random move connects the two great spans of time and space to become "an artifact of our time." This work "The Big Sea" is also a continuation of the artist's early work "The Canned Camera". When the lens is used as a water tank lid, the water tank inside the lens actually turns into a box, suggesting that photography is a primitive desire far more ancient than the birth of the camera. This clever tempering of image generation, application and cognition is more clear and in-depth in this work.
Cai Dongdong was selected and reported by the New York Times as one of the "Eight Artists who Show where Photography is Going" at the Paris Photo Exhibition (Paris Photo 2018) this year.