Suspended Cars, Leaping Wolves
China's Art Star Cai
Guo-Qiang at the New York Guggenheim Museum
Cai
Guo-Qian
Tornado: Explosion
Project for the Festival of China, 2005
Photo
Hiro Ihara. Courtesy Cai Studio
His
spectacular firework displays have made him one of the best-known Chinese
artists internationally. Now, the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum is giving Cai
Guo-Qiang his largest retrospective to date. At the same time, Cai
Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe is the first one-person exhibition in
a New York museum of a Chinese-born artist. The show, conceived in close
collaboration with Cai, who has been living in New York since 1995,
presents more than 80 works.
Cai
Guo-Qian
Self Portrait: A
Subjugated Soul, 1985-89
Leo Shin
Collection
Photo: Courtesy Cai
Studio
One of the main features are the
works made with gunpowder: Explosion Events, fireworks the artist
presented in more than 20 cities worldwide and documented on video. Also
on show are his Gunpowder Drawings, a series of large-scale
drawings begun in 1985 that arise as traces of gunpowder detonated over
long sheets of paper. On three levels of the museum’s rotunda, visitors
can follow the development of his work in this unusual medium, which has
become his trademark.
But some of Cai's most important
installations can also be seen in New York, such as Head
On, which consists of 99 life-sized wolves charging at a glass
wall in a high arch. The energy-laden pack of wild animals was made in
2006 as a commissioned work for the Deutsche
Guggenheim in Berlin. The artist views it as a symbol for the
"universal human tragedy that results from this blind storming ahead, from
the uncompromising way in which we seek to reach our goals," as Cai
explained in an interview
for db artmag.
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Cai Guo-Qian
Head
On, 2006
Deutsche Bank
Collection;
Commissioned work
for Deutsche Guggenheim
Photo
Hiro Ihara. Courtesy Cai Studio
Adapted
to the inimitable exhibition space of the Guggenheim Museum, the
exhibition features new, site-specific variations of earlier
installations. For Inopportune: Stage One in the atrium of the
rotunda, Cai suspended nine cars in the air – adorned with blinking tubes
of light to simulate the vehicles' explosion.
Cai
Guo-Qian
Inopportune: Stage One,
2004
Installation Seattle Art
Museum
Photo Hiro Ihara. Courtesy
Cai Studio
For Venice's Rent Collection
Courtyard, life-sized clay sculptures transform an entire level of the
museum spiral into a dynamic artist's workshop. And in An Arbitrary
History: River, a winding river of bamboo and plastic resin sends the
visitor on an interactive journey in a rowboat.
Cai
Guo-Qiang
Venice's Rent
Collection Courtyard, 1999
Deposito Polveri, Arsenale, 48. Venedig Biennale, 1999
Photo
Elio Montanari. Courtesy Cai Studio
Cai's
multifaceted works call on the viewer to adapt to different realities.
Since the early nineties, he has realized a large number of projects
worldwide that combine traditional Chinese art and culture with western
post-conceptual thought. Whether he records his explosive art on paper or
in the sky, or creates bridges, dragons, and black holes of light and
color – he always undermines preconceived patterns of perception and
confronts the viewer with the contradictions of an increasingly globalized
world. Next year, Cai Guo-Qiang will realize the most popular project of
his career: as Art Director of Visual and Special Effects, he will play a
major artistic role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer
Olympics in Peking – a gigantic art spectacle for four billion TV
viewers.
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York
February 22 - May 28, 2008
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