Cai Guo-Qiang (Artist) 10/10/10

Work

Cai Guo-Qiang Head On Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain 2009

Cai Guo-Qiang Head On Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany, 2006

Cai Guo-Qiang Black Fireworks (Project for IVAM,) Gunpowder on paper, backed on wood panel 2005

Cai Guo-Qiang Descending Wolves: For the Guggenheim International Gala Bohen Foundation, New York, USA 2006


Cai Guo-Qiang Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, France 2010

Cai Guo-Qiang Inopportune Stage Two National Gallery of Canada, Shawinigan, Quebec, Canada 2006

Cai Guo-Qiang Inopportune Stage One Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA 2008



Bio

Cai Guo-Qiang is a contemporary Chinese, born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, who exhibits his installations all over the world. Guo-Qiang has received international attention for his work, which channels many cultural, global, and human issues, as well as his reoccurring theme of explosion. “Looking at the work that I’ve done, I’ve noticed things sticking into or out of objects a lot. I think this has to do with my interest in explosions, but it also has to do with the aesthetics of pain.” (Guo-Qiang, Guggenheim interview) The artist is very widely recognized for his painterly gunpowder drawings, which he crafts by literally placing explosives onto the surface of the canvas, and lighting them. Guo-Qiang references many Eastern stories and folklore, recalling his youth spent in China, as well as allusions to global politics such as the push pull of capitalism/communism, reflecting his years living under the rule of Mao Zedong. For example, his installation, Head On, directly reference the history of Berlin, namely allegories for the "Iron Curtain" separating East from West, capitalism from communism. Guo-Qiang constructed 99 wolves synthetically and suspended them in a seemingly perpetual pack stampede into a glass wall, where they make a chaotic impact, fall to the ground, get up and run again to the back of the line. The installation is meant to relate historically to Berlin's history, as well as being "related to the destiny of mankind." "As we know, glass walls are not structural, and invisible walls are the hardest to destroy." (Guo-Qiang, Guggenheim interview)

Guo-Qiang. "I Want To Believe, Head On, 2006" YouTube: guggenheimbilbaio, 2009. 30 Apr. 2009. Accessed 10 Oct 2010.

Relates

I was originally attracted to Guo-Qiang's work because of its physical grandeur, and then because of his use of animal symbolism. I focused on Head On, the piece discussed above when relating my work to this artist, however, his general theme of explosion and impact is one I think relates to my work as well, concordantly and antithetically. The conceptual framework for my work so far is the impact and connectivity of "the other" (inter-species, inter-gender) which channels an impact/explosion of sorts. However, the visual nature of my work has more implosive qualities, for example, pieces of imagery cut into others, creating a constant shortening and complete evolution of the subject. I found Guo-Qiang's, Head On, to be especially relatable to my work, because of the allusions it makes to perpetuity and extinction, using animal symbolism. By choosing the wolf for the installation, the artist immediately references "pack" species in relation to humanity's collective struggle, and inability to break the patterns of inefficiency socially and politically, exacerbating this perpetual motion into a glass wall, or a version of the proverbial "glass ceiling," despite its "heroism." "Cai’s flying pack of wolves is presented here as a warning against blind submission to ideology." (Halle) This relates to my work because of my use of animal imagery to allude to issues of human conundrums, including connections and disconnections associated with hunting, bestiality, evolution, object culture, and sexuality. Also, my work references perpetuity and extinction, by examining taxidermy and its conundrum within itself. (Immortality of taxidermy for trophy purposes leading to extinction of traits or species.)

Halle, Howard. "Cai Guo-Qiang: "I Want To Believe" Time Out NY, Art Review. 5 March 2008. Accessed 10 Oct. 2010.

Quotations

"Or perhaps it's just the quieter hint in "Head On" that every living creature is racing toward oblivion."

McGuigan, Cathleen. "CAI Guo-Qiang's 'Head On'" Newsweek: Art. 10 Jan. 2009. Accessed 10 Oct 2010.

"Cai's importance comes from connecting dichotomies that are as ancient as humankind and as contemporary as the global economy: East/West; Domestic/Foreign; Capitalism/Communism; Sacred/Secular; Ephemera/Eternality. "

Gersh-Nesic, Beth. "Cai Guo-Qiang, I Want To Believe" About.com, Art History: Exhibition Review. Accessed 10 Oct 2010.

"Cai's harnessing of Mao Zedang's maxim, "Destroy nothing, create nothing" overlaps with Picasso's dictum, "My painting is a sum of destructions." (The life-cycle of birth-death-rebirth is universal; the visualization of its meaning is cultural.) "

Gersh-Nesic, Beth. "Cai Guo-Qiang, I Want To Believe" About.com, Art History: Exhibition Review. Accessed 10 Oct 2010.

Interviews

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/04/art/cai-guo-qiang-with-ellen-pearlman

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/cai/clip1.html

Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder painting

Gallery

Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art
http://qag.qld.gov.au/collection/contemporary_asian_art/guo_qiang_cai

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (Permanent Collection)*

*In addition to many other museums and galleries' permanent collections


Website

http://www.caiguoqiang.com/