Alex Guofeng Cao is a Chinese artist who ran into the art of photography in New York, the city where he lives. He fell helplessly in love, especially after having seen the works of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe, who, above all, were his inspiration.
His most recent work consists of a gallery of images portraying famous modern and contemporary people. They are Cyclopean photographs that take up an entire wall. It is impossible not to be sucked in by them. But we immediately sense that they are not normal portraits. In fact, from close up, getting a better look at the “raw material” used to create the individuals, we note that the faces have been composed by putting together hundreds of small, virtually identical photographs.
Succinctly put, Cao’s are ingenious mosaics which suggest ties and connections between the giant-sized and miniature stars who, like a collection of different DNA cells, make up the body of their host.

Alex Guofeng Cao
Decompose/Recompose: Resurrect
S T U X Gallery, New York
May 6, 2010 - May 29, 2010