MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present Cai Jian’s solo exhibition “Holdhold&Holdholdhold” on September 4th, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at MadeIn Gallery, featuring a new series of sculptures.

In his painting series “Horizon” from 2019, Cai zoomed in on the bubble inside spirit levels and insisted that each bubble, with a varying location, constituted a new reason for being. His work was a testament to the illusiveness or artificiality of time, space, and our perception thereof in an age intruded by digital technology. In the subsequent “Hyperfocus” series, Cai fiddled with the optical speckle on lenses and dramatized the mutual gaze between the camera and the viewer.

For the current exhibition, Cai continues his “readily available ready-made” mode of practice and extends it from painting to three-dimensional works. The exbition’s same-titled sculptures, with their volume and colour, reflect the inspiration that the artist draws from rock climbing. When interacting with the “shape of ready-mades” as part of his creative process, he deploys the existential logic of the object itself to construct a new visual signification.

Cai’s practice is characterized by his discovery and imagination of new delights and ways of the existence of objects in contemporary society. Integrating diverse references including technology, material, and ready-made, he challenges the determinacy of our existential value while expanding its boundaries. Ultimately, he points to the absurdity, constantly being renewed, that clouds the relation between the object and its creator.