Cai Guo-Qiang

Washington DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Cai Guo-Qiang: Traveler - Unlucky Year: Unrealized Projects from 2003-2004, October 30, 2004 - April 24, 2005, p. 4, illustrated in color 

He Zhengguang, Cai Guo-Qiang, Taipei, 2005, p. 130, illustrated in color

The work is in very good condition. There are pinholes in the four corners of each sheet of paper. Otherwise, there are no visible condition problems with this work.
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Cai Guo-Qiang is an alchemist cum soothsayer of the first order.  His powerfully imagistic work captures a moment in time that transports the viewer on an often emotional journey through magical artistic processes invested with social critique.  Best known for his spectacular exploding gunpowder events (and the traces they have left in the form of large-scale drawings), Cai is equally expressive in massive sculptural installations made from cars, boats, animal forms, and any other number of strange media.  One of the conceptual masters of the 1980's Chinese avant-garde, Cai left China for Japan in the latter part of that decade in order to find a place for free expression.  After living in Japan for nearly ten years, he set his sights on New York, moving there to further extend his international reach.  Now in many ways tri-cultural, Cai draws from all of his diverse experiences to infuse his work with a spiritual and conceptual universalism that he takes with him for creative projects the world over.

One of the most prolific artists of his generation—and surely one of its most visible—Cai has been invited to conduct performances in far-flung places like the deserts of Egypt, no less than in cultural centers such as Paris and Beijing.  Escalator:  Explosion Project for Centre Pompidou (Lot 56) is the result of one such site-specific project in the heart of Paris, for which the artist was commissioned in 2003 to mark a year of exchange between China and France.  Initially, Cai hoped to set off his signature fireworks along the entire expanse of Renzo Piano's exterior escalator on the façade of the Centre Pompidou, but that plan was impossible to realize because of fire regulations.  Instead, he laid down two massive sheets of paper in the plaza in front of the building and conducted an explosion event, placing the gunpowder so as to mimic the layout of the zigzagging escalator above.  When the fuse was ignited, the "drawing" exploded, leaving an impression of the Centre Pompidou's façade behind, its snake-like escalator clearly visible in the negative white space.  Cai was thus able to capture the ghost of architecture in his spectacle of fire and smoke, while at the same time uniting his native Chinese pyrotechnics with an iconic symbol of modern France.

Two smaller explosion-based works on paper show in great detail the remnants of the artist's experiments with gunpowder and fire.  The beautiful expanse of Cai Guo-Qiang Firework Book, an early work of 1991 (Lot 183), provides a linear narrative of a different kind, as the work's accordion pages unfold to reveal the passage of the arc of fire over its almost eight-foot length.  Explosion Start From Sky (1996, Lot 184), which relates to a planned large-scale public work from 1996, suggests the image of a dragon flying through the sky, its tail and wings leaving trails behind it as it swoops and ultimately burns away.  Both of these works show the after effects of chance, inherent in Cai's art-making process, in the form of the frozen remains of gunpowder and flames on a once-white, stark ground.

Animals play an important role in Cai's oeuvre, and he invokes their mythological powers and symbolism in his own contemporary fables, played out as tableaux in three dimensions.  In 2006, the artist positioned several life-size alligator sculptures impaled with pointed bamboo sticks and actual airport security station contraband—knives, scissors and various blades among them—on the roof-top garden of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The work referenced our fear in the face of terrorism in the contemporary world, and Cai stabbed the alligators—a symbol of power in cultures around the globe—with the confiscated objects; we might read this gesture as a shamanistic act that both enacts and wards off the terror of destruction.  The sculptural group Alligators (Lot 188) commemorates Cai's installation and performance and was in fact a fund-raising edition that helped enable the realization of the impressive work.  In a similar group on offer, Study for a Wolf's Bodily Movement (Lot 186), nine wolves are variously posed, and together they form a gently undulating group that mimics the massive installation Cai made for Head On, his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin (also in 2006; the work is currently on view at the Guggenheim in New York).  These wolves are resin casts of clay figure studies used as models for the ninety-nine life-sized wolves of the Head On installation.  The animals Cai deploys in installations are produced in his home town of Quanzhou by a workshop specializing in the manufacture of remarkably lifelike, full-scale animal replicas.  

Boeddha (Lot 185), the largest of three similar works on offer (Lots 187 and 189), is an oil painting on paper in which Cai depicts the image of Buddha, hovering in the center of a very large sheet of paper.  Ethereal colors—golds, beiges, grays and creams—give the depicted sculptural figures a ghost-like presence, in which specific representational details are dissolved by an internal glow from a psycho-religious realm.  Cai uses a similar strategy in his work Nontransparent Monument (Lot 57), a set of five charcoal rubbings on handmade Chinese rice paper made from the massive sculpture of the same name positioned adjacent to the above-mentioned alligators on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in 2006.  The large carved-stone mural consisted of dozens of vignettes from contemporary news and politics, ranging from natural disasters and 9-11 to popular culture and Hollywood gossip.  The present works preserve these stories like gravestone rubbings or documents from an archaeological dig.  And such references may be intentional, for Cai Guo-Qiang has made a career of excavating the furthest reaches of our collective psyche and the contemporary culture we share.

-Eric Shiner