In recent years, the Chinese art photographer Cai Dongdong has received attention for his idiosyncratic works, which explore his own and appropriated photographs for their expressive content in the interests of undermining or expanding on it. To this end, Dongdong employs a number of strategies such as working over parts of the picture surface, folding, collage and combining the pictures with other objects. This is all part of an effort to emphasize the object nature of the photographic print and to reveal the potential for transforming the meaning inherent in it as a material. 

With this exhibition, curators Yasmine Benhadj-Djilali and Michael Schäfer attempt to bring the viewer closer to Cai Dongdong’s view of the medium of photography, which he addresses in many of his works. Since the majority of his appropriated motifs date from the period between 1950 and the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1976, Obstacles also provides deeper insight into the artist’s special approach to his country’s history in the second half of the twentieth century.