Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

154 155 For an artist, creating a major interactive project specifically for children, and unequivocally sharing their inspiration, working methods and ideas, might be an unfamiliar and intimidating proposition. Cai Guo-Qiang is not daunted by such prospects; in fact, his ease working with children as collaborators and audience is well known. Throughout his career, Cai has openly and directly involved young people in his work and ideas, producing engaging and ambitious projects in museum and community contexts. The diversity of these projects echoes the creative spirit that appears to be an endless source for his work. Cai Guo-Qiang’s children’s project, produced in collaboration with QAGOMA’s Children’s Art Centre for ‘Falling Back to Earth’, provides a setting for children to experience the artist’s practice — gunpowder drawings, explosion events, and the symbolic imagery of boats, animals and trees that often recur in his installations. Cai’s intention for the exhibition was to ‘share with children my experience as an artist, allowing them to understand and participate in an artist’s practice in more depth’. As children take on the roles of artist and exhibition-maker within the space — a concept based on the practice of Cai Studio — they create their own objects, such as boats. As a boy growing up in the port city of Quanzhou, Cai played with toy boats made out of tin cans and origami. He describes the boat as ‘the first form of human construction. The first time man built dwellings . . . [W]hen you are looking at a boat you are also looking at a house’. For Cai, the boat is a metaphor for displacement, but also evokes movement, adventure, the unknown and discovery. As vessels, they symbolise exchanges between cultures, across time, and perhaps between reality and the imaginary. Within the studio, children can also choose to make a tree or an animal, referencing the Eucalyptus and Heritage works on display in ‘Falling Back to Earth’. The 99 animals in Heritage 2013 — a mix of herbivores and carnivores from many continents — exist peacefully together. The installation provides endless inspiration for young artists and an opportunity, as Cai hoped, for children to have ‘the utmost intellectual freedom’. 1 Young visitors to the exhibition are provided with templates and a range of materials, granting them the freedom to creatively interpret Cai’s work. Children’s Art Centre trial for Let’s Create an Exhibition with a Boy Named Cai , Children’s Art Centre, Gallery of Modern Art 2013 Let’s Create an Exhibition with a Boy Named Cai Tamsin Cull Creating their own exhibitions through the exploration of Cai Guo-Qiang’s practice, children virtually reimagine the wonderful world of the artist’s explosion events and gunpowder drawings using multimedia touchscreens and digital effects. These exhibitions are ignited on-screen and finished with drawings shared via email with friends and family. A narrative that evokes the spirit of the fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming’s fable Peach Blossom Spring — which tells the tale of a fisherman who becomes lost when following a stream — provides a framework for the Children’s Art Centre project. The fisherman discovers a hidden utopian society where people coexist happily and are free to follow their dreams without distractions from the outside world. In Cai’s story, the main character is a young incarnation of the artist who pursues his dream to make art, and he is joined by children he meets from around the world: In a fictional universe [that] consists of only children, the protagonist, Cai Guo-Qiang, along with his collaborators . . . all take their childhood forms. Cai wanders all over the world, from one place to another, joining the local children at each location for some fun time, creating art together. 2 Proposal for Children’s Art Centre at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2012 Pencil on paper Collection: The artist Courtesy: Cai Studio