Jintong Cai

“Intuition and narrativity should never stand in opposition; human intuition is uninterrupted, and every event is made up of uninterrupted intuition and rational choice. Rationality is a beautiful quality inherent in human beings, and choice proves their existence. The moment intuition is spoken, it becomes an event, and the event becomes a trace of intuition. My work is a balance between intuition and narrative. You see the world. You see yourself. The existence of the beauty of rationality and intuition is meaning.”


Jintong is a visual artist. In her work, she attempts to construct a new world through continuous intuition, her perceptions of the world, sensory experiences established with materials, and her own cultural experiences and identity. She uses narrative text to integrate intuition and events, and then seeks new intuition and feelings through sculpture, materials, and images within the text and events. Her work explores the neglect of human emotions in the face of macro-environmental influences and the disappearance of history in the ever-changing times. In her creation, she engages in dialogue with materials and space as a listener. Through sculpture, installation, and writing, Jintong transforms fictionalised text and materials from single-narrative, human-centric concepts into a new sculptural material, placing the artist's personal feelings within them and achieving a state of equality between humans and objects. 

Whether it is Heidegger's ‘fourfold’ theory of ‘earth, sky, gods, and humans’ or Graham Harman's ‘real objects, real qualities, sensory objects, and sensory qualities,’ both express a tension between reality and the senses. The artist himself also has an artistic understanding of the fourfold structure, believing that materials, the artist's thoughts, the artwork, and the audience are indirectly connected in a fourfold manner. Jintong uses space to showcase the hidden tension of opposition and mutual advancement within this fourfold connection.



Education Background

Chelsea, University of the Arts London                                                          09/2020-06/2024

Major: BA (Hons) Fine Art


Chelsea, University of the Arts London                                                          09/2024-

Major:  MA Fine Art


Group Works/Project

ADEMA-2024


Non-Published

Fiction: Stir-fried  Swordfish

Fiction: The Death of the Rubber Duck



Works


The  Strawberry  from  the  Winter
The Death of the Rubber Duck
Under,  Bridge
Black
Upward, backward or northward


Email: caijintong2019@163.com
Instagram

The  Strawberry  from  the  Winter

In this work, the artist organises an individualistic ‘post-war’ concert. She uses winter strawberries as a metaphor for the gradual loss of our individual rights in society and our eventual numbness and forced acceptance of disenfranchisement. The result of this ‘war’ is the artist's own disintegration of the power structure and her ultimate victory.

Video 2025.02

The Death of the Rubber Duck

This work uses narrative text to catch and integrate personal feelings and passing emotions to build new worlds and events and uses absurd stories and sad kernels to connect to material and find the properties of the material itself. Fragmented materials and uninterrupted intuition build a more inclusive and secure intuition. The fragmented, seemingly separate works within the space also represent intuitively divided wholes in the constitution of new subjects.

Fiction: The Death of the Rubber Duck




2024.12

Under, Bridge

This work began with a piece of fiction I wrote about my mother's funeral. I created this piece using my feelings, imagination and a ridiculous conversation with a fortune teller. It brought me into my mother's life. I took the novel back into a fuller version of myself. The incessant swinging of the pendulum and the recording of different times made the painting less of a painting and more of an archive—an objective and rational expression of my sources of identity and emotional connection as an artist.

Fiction: Stir-fried  Swordfish




I repaired the cracks in the wall, 
and also the cracks within myself.

The snow began to melt,
and a part of me began to melt too.

Time is passing,
the pendulum is counting down.

The nutrients in the soil are depleting,
yet a puddle suddenly appears on the ground.

The phone no longer needs to be answered,
and I no longer need to fill the void.


In the end, The only thing left in this world is the red line. 2024.06

Black

In this project, I chose the most direct way to choose materials and touch them. I use the common construction material steel as the main supporting skeletal structure of the sculpture, the rubber and plastic tubes become the skin on display, and the plastic tubes become the language system. I let the viewer feel the language and life from the materials themselves, focusing on the properties of the materials themselves rather than the functionality of the human world in which humans use them. I collected language and released life in this project.


2023.08

Upward, backward or northward


This project is an archival presentation of three different walks from the perspective of walking: the mass migration of human beings with geographic origins, the change of the city in which I live as a family unit, and my healing walks. The migration of people is presented as a reconstruction of maps to express the concept of a gradually broken city and a drifting hometown. Film photography and written records create a path for several generations of a family to walk in different times and spaces. My healing walks are documented in book form as I walk with five strangers. The whole work transforms a large amount of collected information into paintings, photographs, texts, and installations to be displayed in the exhibition space in the form of archives, attempting to fictionalize history and the future from a personal perspective to reflect on the present as well as the past, and redefining the notion of walking as a point of departure to distort the reality to the audience to reach a point of reflection.


2023.06