Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

12 13 Director’s foreword Chris Saines, CNZM Cai Guo-Qiang is among the world’s most remarkably creative, adventurous and influential contemporary artists. Since his first solo exhibition in 1987 he has gained a truly global reputation built on the incendiary fixed magic of his gunpowder drawings; his always ambitious public explosion events; his tableau- like and visually arresting installations; and his performances and community engaged works. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art is proud to present ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth’, the most extensive exhibition we have undertaken with a living artist, and undoubtedly the most testing of the Gallery of Modern Art’s considerable spatial, structural and design capacity. For what Cai and the Gallery have long shared is a deep commitment to taking creative risks, a commitment that this project and two that preceded it in Brisbane makes apparent. In manifold ways, ‘Falling Back to Earth’ owes both its genesis and even something of its conceptual underpinnings to Cai’s participation in the Second and Third Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art in 1996 and 1999. Both of those prior artistic enterprises were immensely successful at one level and infamously ill-fated at another. For APT2, Cai was commissioned to create two works. The first, which was acquired for the Collection, was a gunpowder drawing that simultaneously conjured the serpentine form of the Brisbane River, the Rainbow Serpent and the Chinese dragon. The second was a gunpowder explosion event that essentially addressed the same cross-cultural theme. Intended to launch the Triennial, the promise of a large-scale fiery and smoke- filled event had galvanised the city in anticipation. Ignited from the sky, it was to rapidly career along the riverbank, snaking under and around one cross-river bridge and a parallel expressway bridge before culminating — a heart-stopping four minutes later — around the central pylon of another, opposite the Gallery, where it would disappear into the water from whence it came. That work was to remain unrealised when, on the day prior, a serious explosion occurred in the fireworks factory that was assisting Cai in its preparation. Cai’s participation in APT3 played out with a similar conflation of gallery-based triumph and river-borne tragedy. On this occasion, he created a large bamboo suspension bridge that strode mightily across the length of the Gallery’s Watermall as small aluminium boats drifted idly below, challenging those who crossed it to negotiate both their own unsteady passage and precipitation from above. In relation to this work, Cai also supported the Gallery to realise its inaugural Kids APT program, a shared commitment to drawing out the creativity of children that continues apace in this exhibition. Just as the 1996 work consisted of two drama-filled stages, the 1999 plan included towing 99 small boats, filled with lit alcohol to evoke a blue fire-breathing dragon, up-river to the Gallery entry. As the performance commenced, an endeavour to widen the flotilla’s meandering arc caused the rear boat to fill with water. In a chain-reaction, largely unseen by the public, the boats were pulled down and their cargo unceremoniously extinguished. Given the inherently volatile materials that Cai often uses, high risk brings with it the much-vaunted possibility of spectacular reward and the occasional likelihood of disappointment. In some ways, then, this exhibition is a form of resolution in reply to Cai’s undeniably vexed history in Brisbane, and the fact that the earlier river-based works either went unrealised or met with mis- adventure has only worked to strengthen our mutual resolve to join forces once more. ‘Falling Back to Earth’, Cai’s first solo exhibition in Australia, is notable for the way in which it elaborates themes that are now central to his work but new to Brisbane: less extra-terrestrial and more emphatically terrestrial; less about Chinese and Aboriginal dreaming mythology and more about our common humanity and the global environment. While looking back to include a signature work of 2006 — Head On — it moves forward through the agency of new commissions — Heritage and Eucalyptus — drawing on the inspiration that Cai continues to find in the landscapes of south-east Queensland. Heritage comprises an unnatural congress of 99 life-sized replica animals — predator and prey, carnivore and herbivore — gathered peacefully to drink from the sandy edge of a pristine lake. Its inspiration was a 2011 visit that Cai made to Brisbane’s Moreton Bay, where he was introduced to North Stradbroke Island by the local Quandamooka people. Among its many scenic wonders, the island’s Brown Lake struck him as emblematic of a ‘last paradise’, a kind of virtual utopia on earth, at once beautiful and an aching reminder of how few such landscapes remain. In effect, Heritage is an impossibly wonderful scene, an elegiac dream-state only periodically disturbed by the intrusion of a single drip of water falling unseen from above. The gentle ripple it produces disrupts the lake’s mirror-like surface and the animals’ reflections that are caught in it — an ideal world only briefly admitting of the real one. It is a moment of pure artistic alchemy that oddly tempers the insistently deep and reflective serenity of the scene. Cai figures Eucalyptus in an almost wilfully opposite way to that of Heritage , as if the correspondence found in one — between what we know to be a work of art, and our knowledge of the natural world — has been all but completely reversed in the other. He does this through the agency of a single magnificently real 31-metre-long spotted gum tree, propped up by its own giant root ball and lying prone but slightly elevated along the full length of the gallery. Eucalyptus provides a dramatic and unique view of the rugged beauty of the natural world. It gives urban dwellers, at least, a rare opportunity to stand among the branches of a fallen tree — reminiscent of the giant Antarctic beeches that Cai encountered at Lamington National Park in Queensland — and to examine its rock-encrusted six-metre-wide root ball, ordinarily buried under the earth. Seated around this consciously ‘unfinished’ work, visitors are invited to consider the tree’s past and to propose an imagined future through their own written and drawn responses. This exercise in personal reflection extends into the contemplative space that Cai creates in his Tea Pavilion , located at the experiential terminus of Eucalyptus and facing out toward the Brisbane River — a site of unfinished business for Cai. The point is underscored in a documentary playing nearby, which revisits the making and unmaking of his 1996 and 1999 projects before it describes the creative arc of ‘Falling Back to Earth’. It is cut from a second eucalyptus tree, found nearby in the same piece of bushland at Springfield, just south of Brisbane, both of which had been earmarked for removal to make way for a new urban development. Tea Pavilion is a place to quietly sit and to sample cold-pressed Tie Guan Yin tea from Cai’s home province of Fujian, on China’s south-east coast. The ritualistic and communal process of making and tasting tea reminds us how easily our daily lives can be made remote from the natural world, however much we require its bounty for our very existence. The final act in ‘Falling Back to Earth’ re-presents one of Cai’s major works, Head On 2006. Commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and now part of the Deutsche Bank collection, Head On reminds us that Cai’s work, even at its most spectacular, has always been engaged with multiple levels of meaning and intention. He is both a fabulist — someone who invariably looks back to ancient tales and myths, just as Heritage draws on Tao Yuanming’s fourth-century poem, ‘Ah, homeward bound I go!’ — and a contemporary commentator, bearing witness to some of the most intractable issues facing our world. In Head On , a pack of 99 terribly lifelike wolves gather to launch themselves into free space, only to crash headlong into a glass wall the precise height of the Berlin Wall, then gradually re-gather to repeat their dreadful task. There is much that has already been said about this work, the wolves as a metaphor for humanity’s relentless but blind pursuit of a singular political ideology, and much that defies description.