Jintong Cai is a visual artist. In her work, she endeavours to construct a new world through continuous intuition, perceptions of the world, sensory experiences forged with materials, and the artist's own cultural experiences and origins of identity.
In the work The Tears' Screw, she returns to her hometown to seek the source of her imagery and poetic hues. By sharing personal and familial memories of her upbringing and economic origins, she extrapolates broader economic and political developments within macro-environments. Through a micro-perspective, she captures and reflects individuals within grand narrative contexts. She continually employs everyday materials to express seemingly ordinary burdens, conveying the powerlessness of individuals under macroeconomic and political forces through humour and light-heartedness.
In Jintong's sculptures and installations, most materials originate from industrial contexts—everyday items awaiting purchase in building supply markets and hardware stores, alongside materials abandoned by humans in derelict factories. She excels at creating tension and a state of mutual resistance between materials and humanity by exploring the inherent agency of the materials themselves. This prompts viewers to perceive value conflicts that challenge anthropocentric perspectives within the conventional functional roles of commonplace objects, alongside the artist's sophistry regarding narrative and improvisation. Her work thus forms a contrast between the rigorous logic of industrial environments and traditional society, and the non-linear narratives of artistic aesthetics. Utilizing materials such as rusted metal frames and fragmented horses, she transforms mundane existence into a poetic material language.
Simultaneously, her practice consistently emphasizes that space itself constitutes part of the material. Works often engage with the structural elements within a space, entering into dialogue with the environment. In this work, she uses factories as a starting point to explore the distinct characteristics of active versus abandoned industrial sites. She deliberately locates the exhibition within the office of an operational factory, highlighting how definitions of “abandoned” and “useful” depend solely on human perspective. By bringing discarded materials from the derelict factory into this space, she seeks to dismantle the traditional objecthood and singular functionality of material substances. Deeply influenced by Haman's object-oriented ontology and Susan Sontag's opposition to interpretation, she employs improvisation to counter humanity's relentless pursuit of meaning while maintaining an equal relationship with diverse materials.
Intuition and narrative should never be positioned as opposites. Human intuition is unceasing; every event is composed of continuous intuition and rational choice. Reason is humanity's innate virtue, while choice affirms our existence. The moment intuition is articulated, it becomes an event; the event, in turn, leaves an imprint of intuition. My work embodies the coexistence and equilibrium of intuition and narrative.
You know this world; you know yourself. The beauty of reason and intuition finds meaning in its very existence.
caijintong2019@163.com
Education
2020-2024 Chelsea College of Arts BA(hons)
2024-2025 Chelsea College Of Arts MA
The Tear’s Screw, Anshan City, China
2025.11.22-2025.12.22