Impermanent Instant" is actually a piece of temporal performance art. Dust requires time to build, so the objects could not move for months at a time in order to leave the most ordinary and natural marks.Li Jun's living conditions became disastrous over the course of this series. His home became his photo studio; objects that could not be moved crowded every corner. He lived a solitary life of observation and photography. After several years, the loneliness became unbearable and Li deemed the series finished. He cleaned the house and moved out, thereby ending a series of photographs that was inseparable from life.
The critical thinking hidden behind Cai Dongdong's work is obtained from his gradual exploration of the history of photography. Why we look, why we look in a certain way, what looking changes in us, and a number of other questions transform these works into forms of photographic archeology. Cai Dongdong's explorations have never stopped at a complete visual system; the stories his works tell contain a sense of longing for the past and a hope for today's society. Confronted with the contemporary phenomenon of the rapid movement and overlapping of time and space, our place in today's online, virtual world is even less clear.For Cai Dongdong, the hope for the self is gradually transformed into anticipation for the self.This anticipation is like the first picture he took of Tang poet Jia Dao's Visiting the Absent Hermit, a process governed by agnosticism.
-Excerpted from "Artists Column, Artscape"
