The China Project

109 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection CAI Guo-Qiang Cai Guo-Qiang’s magnificent gunpowder drawing Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A myth glorified or feared (drawings) Project for extraterrestrials no.26 1996 is a key work in the Gallery’s contemporary Chinese collection. Commissioned for ‘The Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT2), this work captures the energy and unique vision that form Cai’s practice. Born in 1957 in Quanzhou, on the south-east coast of Fujian Province, Cai developed an early interest in the arts encouraged by his father, Cai Ruiqin. Cai Ruiqin’s own interest in calligraphy and painting ensured that Cai Guo-Qiang was exposed to the rich traditions of Chinese art. During his formative years, as a member of a local theatre troupe, he participated in propaganda activites associated with the Cultural Revolution, thereby avoiding the Maoist campaigns of re-education meted out to artists, poets and other intellectuals at the time. As he has said, ‘with the Cultural Revolution, people didn’t go to school, they participated in the revolution instead. I learned the art of propaganda’. 1 Following this period, while still in Quanzhou, Cai experimented with gunpowder as a medium and made his first ‘drawings’ on canvas in the early 1980s. In 1986, he left China to study and work in Japan, and a decade spent there helped him realise his ambitious first works. These include his ongoing suite of gunpowder drawings, collectively titled Project for extraterrestrials , as well as a number of monumental and spectacular installations, for which he has earned an international reputation as a remarkable and inventive artist. Cai moved to New York in 1995, where he continues to live and maintain a studio. He was also one of the key members of the creative team for the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. Cai often pursues his experiments through the medium of fire and the phenomenon of explosion. He believes that fire was the original element that formed the universe, a nodal point in the development of human civilisation, and is hence the original and universal medium that links mankind and the cosmos. 2 In addition, fire grasps the duality of creation and destruction, in all its universal aspects. Cai considers a location’s history and culture as the most important determining elements when conceiving of an artistic project; the Gallery’s gunpowder drawing work, Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A myth glorified or feared (drawings). Project for extraterrestrials no.26 1996, was developed in tandem with a proposal for the Brisbane River for APT2. 3 Characteristic of Cai’s work is his commitment to the spiritual role of the artist; that the artist is able to express inspirational and cathartic gestures for a larger community. The Brisbane River work was planned as a momentous celebration of the connections between the Indigenous Australian Rainbow Serpent and the Chinese Dragon, and the body of works on paper, created by exploding gunpowder on its surface, continues this affirmation. Gunpowder in Cai’s hands . . . becomes a method of describing, displaying and experiencing the world. It can refer to the mushroom cloud of the nuclear test site and at the same time present the gaiety of celebratory rituals, symbolizing reanimation and rebirth. When Cai detonates different explosion events specifically conceived for different sites and subjects around the world, gunpowder no longer serves as a symbol of Chinese civilization and even less as a decorative feature of an exotic land. 4 endnotes 1 Cai Guo-Qiang, quoted by Shandhini Poddar, in T Krens and A Munroe (eds), Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe [exhibition catalogue], Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, p.285. 2 Miyatake Hiroshi, ‘The earth has its black hole too’, in Asian Art Now: Creativity in Asian Art Now: Part 3: Asian Installation Work [exhibition catalogue], Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Asahi Shimbun, Hiroshima, 1994, p.9. 3 The planned river explosion was to involve igniting 18,000 metres of explosive fuse that would traverse the Brisbane River and its banks, weaving around the adjacent freeway and bridge structures. A disastrous fire at the fireworks factory just days before the anticipated event resulted in the loss of the materials (fuse, gunpowder and other items) and the consequent abandonment of the river explosion. 4 Wang Hui, ‘The dialectics of art and the event’, in Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe , p.47. opposite Cai Guo-Qiang created the work Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A myth glorified or feared (drawings). Project for extraterrestrials no.26 for APT2 in Brisbane in 1996. Image © Reina Irmer above Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A myth glorified or feared (drawings). Project for extraterrestrials no.26 1996 Spent gunpowder and Indian ink on Japanese paper / 9 drawings: 300 x 200cm (each); 300 x 1800cm (overall) / Purchased 1996