Cai Guo-Qiang 蔡国强
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
Cai Guo-Qiang is an artist born in Quanzhou City in 1957. Originally a student of stage design, he now uses gunpowder in both dramatic, large-scale performances and in traditional-format artworks. He is renowned for such spectacles as Footprints of History, produced for the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. Cai lives and works in New York
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Date & Place of Birth
Cai was born in 1957, in Quanzhou City in Fujian Province.
Childhood & Family
Cai’s father—a painter, historian, and bookstore owner—was ambivalent in his regard for Mao Zedong. Although he admired Marxist thought, he encouraged his son to read Western classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. This ambivalence was also expressed in the senior Cai's use of the traditional art of calligraphy to reproduce Mao's epigrams.
Education & Development
Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995 he began to make drawings with gunpowder. Thanks to a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, an organization promoting art exchanges between Asia and the US, he moved to New York in 1995. In the US, he became known for a kind of performance art that New York Times critic Roberta Smith labeled “gunpowder land art,” events recorded on videotape. He also continued creating drawings made from gunpowder residue, some of which he altered by painting on them. In addition, he began, like a surprising number of other contemporary Chinese artists, to reveal a gift for creating large-scale installations. Cai’s works of this sort included groupings of stuffed animals, sometimes tigers pierced with arrows or packs of snarling wolves hurtling toward some unseen barrier.
Art
The double use of gunpowder in Cai’s art as a medium for visual artworks and large-scale explosions (advanced firework displays) at the same time refers to Chinese history and symbolism: the art of fireworks was first perfected in China, and the arrangement of elements in his oversized gallery pieces connects with a network of symbols based on feng shui principles, Chinese medicine, vending machines, and references to the animal kingdom. Cai Guo-Qiang’s art falls roughly into four categories:
1. Wall-size and wall-oriented pieces gunpowder drawings suggesting their typical painterliness.
2. Installation pieces from I Want To Believe series of taxidermic arrangements of airborne beasts (tigers, wolves, etc.) speared with arrows.
3. Installations pieces such as "Inopportune: Stage One", in which cars and other typically immovable objects hang in midair, appearing weightless.
4. Large-scale explosions or fireworks such as the Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park piece, New York, or (below) Footprint of History, created for the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Staged in the National Stadium (a/k/a the Bird’s Nest), it required33,866 firing units.
5. Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks. Gunpowder, rice paste, and matches on paper, 75 x 103 x 2 cm opened. Edition comissioned by Ivory Press, 2008. Edition of 9 unique books, 1 artist proof and 1 prototype. Individually titled and signed by the artist. Each book is unique and contains drawings produced individually using gunpowder dust. A metaphor about beauty and destruction.
Commenting on Cai’s work, the Chinese curator Fei Dawei said: “It’s thoroughly chaotic and lacking any intrinsic logic. Just the same, it continuously expands with multiple meanings and multiple methods […] He uses concepts without necessarily making conceptual art […] In this case, while traditional forms break apart, we’re made aware of a search for the universe in their fragments. Cai is an abstract romantic artist.”
Gunpowder
Cai initially began working with gunpowder by exploring its properties in his drawings. This in turn led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale in the form of his signature, theatric "explosion events." These artistically choreographed shows incorporate fireworks and other pyrotechnics. The upredicatability of his unusual materials fosters spontaneity and for him, symbollically counter the repressive artistic and social climate in China.
For video of Cai Guo-Qiang working on an "Explosion Work" at his Long Island, New York, studio in 2006, click here.
Of his relationship with his dangerous and ephemeral material, Cai says: “First, you have to accept that it’s uncontrollable and that there is an accidental element. I’ve worked with the material for so long that I’ve gained an understanding of how it works. Sometimes I can control it better than I realize, better than I expect. Then at that point it becomes stagnant. So it’s very important that there is always this uncontrollability that’s a part of the work. So I continuously want it to give me problems and obstacles to overcome.”
For him gunpowder is the ultimate material . He tells PBS’s Art 21 program: “If we equate making artwork with making love you can see a different approach here. You can talk all day about philosophy—ancient philosophies, modern philosophies, art history, criticism, theories. You can talk about subject matter, context, historical context, the contemporary, postmodernism. You can talk about form and representation. All these things can be discussed but in the end it’s really how you do with this given situation. You can have all these ideas about lovemaking, but it’s really the culmination of all these things, it’s your physicality there, how you’re involved in that moment.” Since September 11th, 2001, he has reflected upon his use of explosives both as metaphor and material. “Why is it important,” he asks, “to make these violent explosions beautiful? Because the artist, like an alchemist, has the ability to transform certain energies, using poison against poison, using dirt and getting gold.”
Artistic Influences
In Cai’s studio hangs a poster of an El Greco painting. When asked about this poster by Art 21, Cai explained: "I’ve always, in my heart and spiritually, felt this affinity towards El Greco. During the Renaissance, dissecting a scene, having proper perspective was revered. But for El Greco, he saw beyond that already, he saw that these were only devices. His work has pride, spirituality, and his own compromises as well. What he has tried to express was beyond what these rational artists were doing at the time. This spirituality is what attracts me the most. This conversation is exchanged with the unseen forces and with the spiritual world.”
Influenced by Eastern culture as well as by Western art. He explains: “I come from a background of alchemy and Taoism, and I’ve combined that with modern physics and a modern worldview.”
Secondary Activities
On the occasion of the 51st Venice Biennial, Cai Guo-Qiang was curator for the “Emersion” Exhibition in the Virgin Garden.
Exhibitions
Cai's most significant exhibition to date was the 2008-2009 retrospective entitled I Want to Believe, which traveled between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the National Art Museum in Beijing.
For Cai Guoqiang's CV, click here.
Auctions & Acquisitions
Prior to Cai’s February 2008I Want To Believe exhibition in New York, at Hong Kong’s Jiashide Auction, his artwork, "APEC Cityscape Firework Show, Fourteen Drafts" was auctioned off for HK 74,247,500, twice the value of its set bid and, at that time, the highest price ever paid for Chinese modern art at an auction.[1]
For a list of collections containing works by Cai Guo-Qiang, click here.
References
http://artist.artxun.com/C/14-13059/
http://www.artnet.de/magazine/reviews/muenter/muenter08-28-06.asp
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1484369/Cai-Guo-Qiang
