The last time you’ve visited the Chu Room you may have noticed a change in the artwork featured in those big glass shelves. Now on view in the room until Nov. 8 is Cai Dongdong’s “Off Target,” a contemporary Chinese art exhibit featuring a variety of the artist’s photographic works. Growing up in the 1970s in Gansu, a northwestern province in China, Cai discovered his love for photography when he was serving in the China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and was tasked with taking pictures of all the soldiers on his base for their identification cards. Cai eventually left the army and went on to study photography at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. While Cai found photography’s ability of “recording reality” particularly intriguing, after delving deeper and deeper into the medium he slowly began to question the idea of photography being able to “capture reality.”
Off the Target, 2015
“I suddenly realized that images are unreal, false, and deceptive….In fact images are just material objects, when you are obsessed with them, you are actually blurring the line between yourself and the material objects…The camera will always seduce you, but I can no longer think of a reason why after all I must snap a photo,” said Cai during an interview this past summer at his studio with Yibing Huang, who is a professor of Chinese at Conn.
Cai’s Chu room exhibition, “Off Target,” features a wide array of Cai’s works. While one can interpret his works in many different ways, a major theme throughout Cai’s works is his emphasis on the constructed nature of photographs, the idea that while photographs may seem to capture one’s “reality,” photos are actually manipulations and are often constructed by the artist in specific ways. Unlike the conventional photographer, most of Cai’s images are not solely photos he snapped one day and edited. Throughout many of his pieces, Cai has recycled some of his own photographs as well as used other’s photographs that he salvaged, to construct new and sometimes abstract images.
Practice Shooting, 2015
One piece featured in the exhibition is a photograph that Cai took of the sea years ago. For this work, he decided to cut the photo in half in a diagonal. During Cai’s interview with Professor Huang, Cai explains the inspiration behind this work, describing that “It [the photograph] no longer mattered to me, so I cut it. But after the cut, the visual effect of this picture changed. There was something new being added to it…I dug out that series of pictures and made distinct edits to each one of them. At that time many of my friends saw them and thought that was quite novel. It was as if they had pushed photography one step further by treating an image as a material object. So I believe it is a direction available for further exploration.” Another significant work featured in the exhibition includes “Offer.” At first glance, “Offer” seems to be a picture of a darkroom set up. However as one studies the picture for longer, one will realize that this photograph’s darkroom is actually a constructed darkroom set. On the far right of the image, one can catch a glimpse of wires and details light fixtures signifying that this setup is actually a set that was constructed by someone. When asked to comment what he would want to say to viewers of the exhibition, Cai said: “I think that our current time is flooded by images. When everyone is all producing images, you have to have this awareness, that is, don’t simply turn yourself into an image.”
“Off Target” is curated by East Asian Studies Department head Professor Yibing Huang in collaboration with Connecticut College’s Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection and Klein Sun Gallery in New York. •
