Cai Guoqiang

Cai Guo-Qiang (; born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City and New Jersey.

Biography

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. His father, Cai Ruiqin, was a calligrapher and traditional painter who worked in a bookstore. As a result, Cai Guo-Qiang was exposed early on to Western literature as well as traditional Chinese art forms.

As an adolescent and teenager, Cai witnessed the social effects of the Cultural Revolution first-hand, personally participating in demonstrations and parades himself. He grew up in a setting where explosions were common, whether they were the result of cannon blasts or celebratory fireworks. He also “saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction”. It seems that Cai has channeled his experiences and memories through his numerous gunpowder drawings and explosion events.

In his late teens and early twenties, Cai Guo-Qiang acted in two martial art films, ''The Spring and Fall of a Small Town'' and ''Real Kung Fu of Shaolin.'' Later intrigued by the modernity of Western art forms such as oil painting, he studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. The experience allowed him a more comprehensive understanding of stage practices and a much-heightened sense for theater, spatial arrangements, interactivity, and teamwork.

Artwork

Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials. These include fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings, which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing." Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment." Cai was among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.

Early work

Cai's work is mainly inspired by traditional Chinese culture. It also draws from political topics. As a student, Cai made works consisting of stick-figure or abstract patterns in oil and burnt gunpowder. This giving him a place in the experimental ferment preceding the '85 New Wave. However, Cai moved to Japan in 1986 as the movement was building.

''Projects for Extraterrestrials''

In 1990, Cai began ''Projects for Extraterrestrials'', which consisted of using large fireworks and extensive trails of blazing gunpowder that span across landscapes and building surfaces. Site-specific, the projects were implemented in various locations throughout the world. ''Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10'' (1993) was representative of the nature of the projects as a whole, as it involved an approximately six-mile-long gunpowder fuse that extended beyond the western end of the Great Wall at the edge of the Gobi Desert. The fuse burned for about 15 minutes after it was lit, creating a dragon-like pattern across the dunes that was indicative of China's imperial and mythological heritage. The title for the series refers to Cai's inspiration for the project: the belief in a need for a new, higher perspective in which celebrations of pure energy replace earthly conflicts, and gunpowder, the "material fuel" of such conflict, becomes a system that delivers beauty and joy.

Gunpowder works

Cai initially began working with gunpowder drawings and ephemeral sculptures to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature "explosion events". In 1995, he moved to New York with a grant from the New York-based Asian Cultural Council, an international organization that promotes artistic exchanges between Asian countries and the United States.

In 1998, Cai worked with fashion designer Issey Miyake on a one-off collection for Miyake's Guest Artist series. For it, Cai arranged gunpowder on white garments in the form of dragons symbolizing life, and set fire to the powder to burn the images into the clothes. Miyake then had the images reproduced as fabric prints for his Pleats Please line.

''Inopportune'' installations

In 2004, Cai Guo-Qiang installed ''Inopportune: Stage One'' and ''Inopportune: Stage Two'' at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The piece was duplicated in 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. MASS MoCA describes the installation as such:

''Inopportune: Stage One'' (2004) is also featured in the main entrance of the Seattle Art Museum.

City of Flowers in the Sky

As a tribute to the center of the Italian Renaissance, Cai Guo-Qiang created an explosive depiction of flowers using fireworks across the blue skies of Florence, Italy, as his canvas, on November 18, 2018. The performance art piece lasted about ten minutes on Piazzale Michelangelo overlooking the city. During the event, which was inspired by Botticelli's " Primavera," 50,000 custom-made fireworks released smoke that resembled thousands of flowers. The spectacle introduced the Cai's solo exhibition, ''Flora Commedia: Cai Quo-Qiang at the Uffizi''.

Other

In an interview in ''The Brooklyn Rail'', Cai said of his piece ''Light Cycle'', commissioned by Creative Time in 2003: "Because this was a post 9/11 New York I wanted to provide an anchor and reference point for people to feel hope. That is why I picked the reservoir in Central Park and made a full circle. It is kind of a protection, a symbol for comfort and fullness."

Cai is one of the most well-known and influential Chinese contemporary artists, having represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1999 with his project ''Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard'', a time-based sculpture which he had artisans recreate the ''Rent Collection Courtyard,'' a famous work of Socialist Realist propaganda sculpture. Cai returned to Venice in 2005 to curate the Chinese pavilion.

His work has also attracted controversy. ''Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard'' drew condemnation within China from the original authors of the Socialist Realist sculpture for destroying their "spiritual property." Some critics have asserted that while his work references politics and philosophy, he seems to switch positions at will and that the references seem relatively opportunistic.

In response to the critical backlash against his appropriation in the "Venice Rent Collection Courtyard," Cai has said in an interview in ''The Brooklyn Rail'':

From May 2–September 25, 2010, Cai was featured in the solo exhibition ''Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis,'' which presented works from peasants in China. This includes homemade airplanes, helicopters, submarines, and robots.

Cai also created ''Odyssey'', a permanent gunpowder drawing for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Fall 2010. Installed as part of the museum's ongoing Portal Project and stretching across forty-two panels, it is one of his largest gunpowder drawings to date. Another solo exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang – 1040M Underground'', was on view at the new foundation IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine through the fall of 2011.

In December 2011, ''Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab'' opened at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar - the artist's largest since his 2008 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and his first solo exhibition ever in a Middle Eastern country. Saraab (mirage in Arabic) features more than fifty works, including seventeen newly commissioned pieces, thirty recent works and nine documentary videos. The exhibition opened on December 5th with ''Black Ceremony'', the artist's largest ever daytime explosion event and includes several large-scale site-specific installations. In 2016, he curated ''What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China'' at Al Riwaq in Doha.

In 2016, Cai was tasked with designing the Berggruen Philosophy Prize's trophy.

Cai's work was featured in the 2016 Netflix documentary ''Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang'', highlighting his work with fireworks, particularly his 1,650-foot ladder of gunpowder.

Cai was highlighted in the 2018 BBC
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