CAI GUO-QIANG

Born 1957 in Quanzhou City, China. Lives and works in New York, USA.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes, dimensions variable. Collection of Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honour of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Installation view at Shawinigan Space, National Gallery of Canada, 2006 Courtesy Cai Studio. Photograph: Kazuo On

Cai Guo-Qiang has a history of making works of extraordinary beauty from violent beginnings; most famously using gunpowder, fireworks and explosions. Since the 1980s, he has pushed the limits of artistic practice and his use of radical materials such as gunpowder tap into the spontaneity, chance and intensity of natural forces with a view to healing the disrupted energies and histories of the planet. Cai harnesses wild energy by igniting gunpowder placed directly on to canvas and paper, and he is well known internationally for his ‘explosion events’ that began in the late 1980s. The artist has been commissioned on several occasions to create spectacular fireworks displays, including his celebrated projects for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. More than this inventiveness, Cai is known for works that take in the aesthetic traditions and myths of Chinese culture, medicine and science.

Cai’s non-art materials are often exhibited in unique, non-art spaces. In his tenth ‘Project for Extraterrestrials’, entitled Project to Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters (1993), gunpowder fuse was laid out at the north-western end of the wall stretching ten kilometres into the desert. An invited audience was given different Chinese medicines before and after the ignition to stimulate and calm their energy. The wall is rumoured to be the only man-made feature that can be seen from the moon and is supposed to follow the ancient ‘dragon meridian’ and therefore to be an ‘amplifier’ of qi – cosmic, spiritual and physical power. Cai’s ongoing series Everything is Museum has used sites such as military bunkers and pottery kilns for the presentation of art. In 2000, the artist created the Dragon Museum of Contemporary Art (DMoCA) out of a kiln transported from his home village in China to a remote mountain village in Japan, as an act of resistance against the practices of major museums and a social gesture designed to involve the local community with its continuing presence.

Of his sculptural installations, Cai’s Inopportune: Stage One (2004) is one of the most challenging and spectacular. The installation of nine cars appears arrested in an animated sequence of explosion; each identical white vehicle frozen in an arc of detonation, blast, launch, tumbling, gravitational return, and rest. The cars are pierced with pulsing rods of light that simultaneously suspend the cars like wings and penetrate them like blades, signifying a coexisting violence and beauty.

‘I make explosions, so I pay attention to explosions,’ he has said about these works. ‘I can imagine the methods used and the mental state of the suicide bombers … Before igniting an artwork, I am sometimes nervous, yet terrorists face death unflinchingly. Along with the sympathy we hold for the victims, I also have compassion for the young men and women who commit the act. Artists can sympathize with the other possibility, present issues from someone else’s point of view. The work of art comes into being because our society has this predicament. Artists do not pronounce it good or bad.’ In this statement, Cai Guo-Qiang is talking about the geometry of morality: there is no effect without cause. While the effects of terrorism are obvious and horrifying, its causes are by no means clear. Self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal may be misguided and cruel, but it is fuelled by a warped integrity that has a cause of its own. In such a literally vicious circle, an act of healing cannot take place unless both sides are brought together. Like Joseph Beuys, the making whole, the act of healing, is what Cai Guo-Qiang aims to do through his work.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010 ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms’, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, USA
2009 ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe’, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain
2008 ‘7th Hiroshima Art Prize: Cai Guo-Qiang’, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan
2008 ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
2007 ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune: Stage One’, semi-permanent installation, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Integration and Resistance in the Global Era’, 10th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba
2008 ‘Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book’, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
2007 ‘Journeys: Mapping the Earth and Mind in Chinese Art’, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
2005 ‘The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art’, Millennium Monument Art Museum, Beijing, China
2003 ‘Tate & Egg Live 2003’, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, UK

Selected Bibliography

Emma Dexter, Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2005, pp. 48–49
David Elliott, ‘Heaven and Earth, Space and Time in the art of Cai Guo-Qiang’, Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadephia, 2010
Takao Kakizaki, ‘Light Passage: Interview with Cai Guo-Qiang’, Light Passage: Cai Guo-Qiang & Shiseido, exhibition catalogue, Shiseido Corporate Culture Department, Tokyo, 2007, pp. 32–37
Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004, p. 362
A. Munroe, D. Joselit, M. Kwon and W. Hui, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, 2009