Cai Guo-Qiang

Albion, London

North Adams, Massachusetts, Mass MoCA; Santa Fe, SITE, Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune, 2005-06, pp. 48-49, illustrated in colour
Quebec, National Gallery of Canada, Cai Guo-Qiang: Long Scroll, 2006

"When I came to Japan my encounters with the theories of twentieth-century astrophysics were very significant to me.  The concepts of the Big Bang, black holes, the birth of stars, what is beyond the universe, time tunnels, how to leap over great distances of time and space and dialogue with something infinitely far away - these ideas were still not commonly in circulation in China at the time.  They were an eye-opener for me.  At the same time, many of these ideas have similarities with traditional Chinese views, with which I was familiar, of metaphysics and the universe.  I wanted my explosions to take place in a vast open space, as if designed to be seen from well above the earth."  The artist cited in Dana Friis-Hansen, Octavio Zaya & Serizawa Takashi, Cai Guo-Qiang, London 2002, p. 16

Commissioned for a major exhibition at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts in 2005, Nine Cars is an extraordinary work of art whose astounding scale belies the extraordinary sensitivity in its surface and the grand imagination which has created it. Created purely from exploded gunpowder, here the powdery charcoal-like surface, alternations in tone and incredible appearance convey an astounding beauty which also conceals a highly intelligent understanding of the medium and its conceptual implications.

A Chinese artist working in America, Cai Guo-Qiang became fundamentally aware not just of the historical and symbolic meaning of gunpowder in his own culture and tradition but also of its current threat in the global war against terror. He was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. The son of a historian and painter, Cai Guo-Qiang was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang first presented his explorations of the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an enquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale. As he has stated,  "In my hometown every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad- weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home- is marked by the explosion of firecrackers...Firecrackers are like the town crier, announcing whatever's going on in the town." Nine Cars was created for a complex large scale installation entitled Inopportune - his own response to the current state of global affairs and possibly more directly the disease of terrorism which seems to be spreading across the planet. The present work emanates from the first stage of this installation which features nine identical white cars which tumbled in an arc across the gallery suspended in mid air as if in stop action. At the end of the sequence the last car lands safely unaltered implying an endless sequence. All of the cars had rods of a dazzling array of coloured lights emanating from them and the implication was that they were primed to explode. The expansive 'drawing' resulted from actual explosions positioned across this vast 'canvas' of white paper. The enormous ellipse that dominates the centre of the drawing was made by exploding gunpowder on the surface of the heavy paper and is comprised of nine exploding cars.

Explosions have been a central part of Cai Guo-Qiang's creative practice since the mid-1980s, when he left China for Japan (where he lived from 1986-1995). One of his best-known explosions on a massive scale was Transient Rainbow, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York soon after September 11, 2001, in which exploding fireworks arced over the East River from Manhattan to Queens. He took the opportunity of the MoMA commission to refigure the meaning of an explosion in Manhattan, to show that "something used for destruction and terror can also be constructive, beautiful, and healing." For Cai Guo-Qiang, explosive forces - whether from gunpowder, fireworks, or even the atomic bomb - go beyond any national or political context. Their origins in alchemy and fundamental physics invoke curative, transformative power and spiritual questions whose scope is eternal rather than immediate, universal rather than local, and metaphysical rather than mundane. In his Inopportune installation for MASS MoCA, those questions took the unequivocal and immediate form of an exploding car bomb, which Cai Guo-Qiang rolls out like a slow-motion kinaesthetic dream. Terrorism is not only geo-political for Cai Guo-Qiang, it is also profoundly intimate.