Born in Tianshu, Gansu, in 1978, Cai Dongdong joined the People’s Liberation Army at a young age and travelled as a photographer with the army. This experience became his formal training in the medium, through which he developed an intense interest in archive images. Cai's current art practice, combining installation and photography, is centred around the use of archival imagery to create a new form of reality. The artist once said: "based on symbolic nature of the archival material, I set out to imagine new contexts, transplant symbolic ideas, confuse the senses, distract visions or change mediums so that new meaning of our visual space could become possible. By stressing on the nature of the image form, and by presenting and questioning the relationship between the image and the viewer, I aim to create something that refuses to assert a definitive direction, this way the connection between the image and reality is transformed."