“Central Union Railroad & Saint Denis” investigates the history of Chinese migrant workers during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad between 1863 and 1869. Through a series of darkroom contact prints with digital negative transfer film made out of video game screenshots, this body of work experiments with the materiality of photography across the digital and the analog and examines contemporary racial representations and historical narratives in the video game industry. Today, the advancement of video game technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality, facial and voice recognition, and wearable device, are extending our sensory perception and transforming our knowledge of nature, history, and personhood. This work explores how the pieces of the real and virtual world interact, fit together or clash, generate complex unforeseen consequences, and reinforce cultural references.
DONG Yuxiang (born 1990, Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, China) is an art, educational, and social worker. His practices and research focus on the exploration of photography and media art as ethnographic methods in the Anthropocene. He has exhibited at Hermitage Museum & Gardens, Norfolk, VA, OCAT Institute, Beijing, Three Shadows photography Art Centre, Beijing, and other international venues. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Joint Second Prize in the International Awards for Art Criticism. He has presented his research at Tate Liverpool, College Art Association Annual Conference, and other international institutions and conferences.
Currently, he is teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to UIUC, he has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a BFA in Photography from Beijing Film Academy, an MFA in Imaging Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University.