|
 |
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim
Harriet Zinnes
A retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work entitled I Want to Believe is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through May 28.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004. Nine cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes. Photo by Hiro Ihara. Courtesy of Cai Studio.Perturbation. Dissolution. Gunpowder smoke. Seventy-five clay sculptures (constructed on site during the exhibition by artisans invited from China); nine real cars pierced with blinking light tubes simulating the trajectory of a car-bomb explosion; piles of broken glass under a mangled yak skin boat constructed of fiberglass and bamboo—all currently on view the Guggenheim Museum.
And who is the creator of this heaped-up assortment of strange entanglements? He is Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced tsai, with the given name pronounced gwo chong). Born in l957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, the artist moved to Japan in l986, and to New York in l995. He is the son of a historian and painter and was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from l981 to l985. It was while living in Japan from l986 to l995 that the artist turned to gunpowder as a medium in his drawings, leading to experimentation with explosives on a massive scale as in his series Projects for Extraterrestrials. It was also while living in Japan that the artist became internationally renown.
There is certainly novelty in the artist’s approach as well as in his use of artistic means. He has referenced a variety of concepts and materials—both Western and Non-western—from feng shui, Chinese medicine, and dragons, to gunpowder, roller coasters, and vending machines. With such a plethora of diverse materials, a viewer may well ask, what is it, exactly, that the artist wants to believe? Is his gunpowder meant to symbolize his wish to end international unease? Are his mushroom clouds intended to make an appeal to eliminate the contemporary horrors of war? In Cry Dragon/City Wolf: The Art of Genhis Khan, l996, for example, the artist merges 106 sheepskin bags, wooden branches, paddles, rope, three Toyota engines, and photocopies of various magazine covers and article clippings. What does this amalgam add up to? Does the artist wish to merge the old and the new, the natural and the manmade, the useful and the contemporary modes of diversion, or is it simply that the materials make an art object that is strange and engrossing? Materials, materials—an artist’s tools and symbols—sometimes bewildering, sometimes perplexing, but in Guo-Qiang’s case, always astonishing.
From the beginning, the artist’s work has been scholarly with political implications. Early on the artist began working with gunpowder to insure spontaneity and, as the catalogue informs us, to “confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and climate in China at the time.” He agrees with the Maoist slogan “to revolt is justified,” saying that, “Anything that disrupts the usual and consensual rule or law is considered good.” Yet one must remember that the artist has made works addressed to extraterrestrials. Indeed, he is very much of this world, one that he would like to make more egalitarian. However, he still searches for his utopic visions in extraterrestrial realms beyond the limitations of mere earthlings.
The artist has a formidable exhibition showing. To name but a recent few: Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006; curating the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005; Tornado: Explosion Project for the Festival of China, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., 2005; Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune at Mass MoCA, North Adams, 2005; Cai Guo-Qiang: Traveler at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2004—and the list goes on and on. His list of awards is also formidable: he was a finalist for the l996 Hugo Boss Prize, the 48th Venice Biennial International Golden Lion Prize, and the 2001 CalARts/Alpert Award in the Arts. In additional, he won the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize, and for Best Exhibition and Best Installation from the International Curators Association.
Cai Guo-Giang is currently a core member of the creative team and Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. But it is at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that eight of Guo-Giang’s most important installations created since the early l990s are being shown. This is certainly a must visit for those who want to discover the best and brightest of contemporary China’s artistic patrimony.
