Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

46 47 Harold Cazneaux New Zealand/Australia 1878–1953 Spirit of endurance 1937 Gelatin silver photograph 28.1 x 33.1cm Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of the Cazneaux family 1975 Photograph: AGNSW Cai’s exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art is titled ‘Falling Back to Earth’, a phrase inspired by Tao Yuanming’s fourth-century prose poem, ‘Ah, homeward bound I go!’. One of China’s most revered poets, Tao epitomises the Daoist ideal of reclusion, or withdrawal into nature, and this poem describes in exquisite detail the tiny changes he notices in his rural home on returning from an unhappy period working in the urban bureaucracy. Tao’s close observations of nature and his desire to live in reclusive self- sufficiency have been a powerful influence on literati artists and writers in China for centuries. A spiritual reverence for trees, ponds, rocks and animals is central to Chinese landscape painting, which presents ‘the integration of the microcosmic human world within the macrocosm of nature as a whole’. 3 Cai’s father was a traditional brush painter and calligrapher, and painted landscapes on matchboxes; this exercise in compression and concentration made a strong impact on the young Cai. As he explains, ‘these small matchboxes perhaps have influenced me more than his serious paintings did. A small space can easily be filled with the corners of the earth’. 4 By opening his exhibition with a staged encounter with a fallen eucalypt, Cai creates a distilled aesthetic experience from a combination of landscape traditions. He confronts us with the pure physicality of nature, while also bringing the imaginary starkly into view. Over the past 25 years, Cai has consistently undertaken to make visible the matrix of invisible forces that structure our world — not only scientific notions of time and space but also concepts of belief, power, memory and creativity — yet his work returns to addressing specific locations and events again and again. ‘Falling Back to Earth’ indicates an increasing focus on the place we live in, rather than the more cosmic direction of earlier works such as his ‘Projects for Extraterrestrials’ series, which began in 1989. Cai’s ephemeral events, in which he uses gunpowder to create dramatic explosions and lyrical drawings on paper and silk, aim to move beyond the constraints of daily realities to commune with the universe — space-age literati painting, one might say. Of enormous ambition and scale, these works are intended to be observed from the heavens, transcending national borders and cultural differences as well as overcoming the restrictive dualities that form too much of our thinking. Critic Wu Hung has noted how Cai’s events subvert and transform dichotomies: . . . violence and peace, terrorism and anti-terrorism, flourishing and decline, reality and art. What are transformed are mutual relations between chasms and exchange, death and life, fear and happiness, solitude and companionship. 5 Wen Zhengming China 1470–1559 Old trees by a cold waterfall Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Hanging scroll, ink and colours on silk 194.1 x 59.3cm The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei