Cai Guo-Qiang, Illusion II: Explosion Project, Berlin 2006
Photo: Hiro Ihara, Courtesy Cai Studio
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Preparation of the installation "Head On", 2006, at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin
Photo: Hiro Ihara, Courtesy Cai Studio
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Cai Guo-Qiang, Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9, 1992, Realized at a military base, Hannover Munden, 1992, Commissioned by The Kassel International Art Exhibition
Photo by Masanobu Moriyama, courtesy Cai Studio
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Cai Guo-Qiang, Self-Portrait: A Subjugated Soul, 1985/89
Collection of Leo Shih, Photo courtesy Cai Studio
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Cai Guo-Qiang
Inopportune: Stage One, 2004
Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes
Dimensions variable
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006
Exhibition copy installed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
„¦ Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York.
Photo by David Heald
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Spectacular firework displays have made Cai Guo-Qiang one of the most popular Chinese artists worldwide. Now, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is showing his largest retrospective to date. The first station of I want to believe at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008 was the museum’s most widely visited art show ever. Afterwards, the exhibition was presented in the context of the Summer Olympics cultural program at the National Art Museum of China in Peking.
The show, conceived in close cooperation with the New York-based artist, includes more than eighty works. One main focus are the works Cai has fabricated using gunpowder, called simply the Gunpowder Drawings; another are the Explosion Events—fireworks that have been detonated in more than twenty cities worldwide. But important installations can also be seen in Bilbao, including Head On (2006), his commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim in which 99 life-sized wolves storm against a glass wall. The work was popular not only among visitors, but also among critics: Cathleen McGuigan, art critic for the American magazine Newsweek, voted the attention-grabbing installation her "Favorite Cultural Moment" of 2008.
Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
3/17 – 9/13/2009
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