Suspended Cars, Leaping Wolves
China's Art Star Cai
Guo-Qiang at the New York Guggenheim Museum
Cai
Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004
installation
view Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
©
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York.
Photo
David Heald.
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.
Cai
Guo-Qiang, Head On, 2006
Deutsche
Bank Collection
installation
view Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
©Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation New York.
Photo
David Heald.
|
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.
Cai
Guo-Qiang, Borrowing your Enemy's Arrows, 1998,
The
Museum of Modern Art, New York
installation
view Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
©Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation New York.
Photo
David Heald.
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. 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,
Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation Cityscape Fireworks, Shanghai 2001,
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
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
