Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

48 49 Cai strives to create unique and spectacular forms of relation in which large groups of people are brought together to realise and to experience his work. They include his explosion events, which arguably reached their zenith with his televised fireworks displays for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, viewed by billions of people throughout the world. They also include his various social projects, where he takes on an impresario role, collaborating with communities to make ephemeral artworks or more permanent ‘museums’, as in his ongoing series ‘Everything is Museum’. These endeavours are often realised in non-art sites, such as the ex-military bunkers on Kinmen Island, Taiwan, just off the coast near Cai’s home town of Quanzhou. In 2004, Cai converted a number of them into BMoCA (Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art) for a range of site-specific artist and community projects. Another site is the countryside near Iwaki in Fukushima Province, Japan, where Cai spent time as a young artist. He returned in 2013 to create the SMoCA ( Snake Museum of Contemporary Art) in response to the area’s devastation following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Cai’s desire to enact social transformation through engaging as many people as possible carries echoes of the propaganda art and theatre he was exposed to as a youth during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), as well as the German artist Joseph Beuys’s concepts of ‘social sculpture’ and ‘anyone can be an artist’. 6 The involvement of large numbers of people also introduces a volatile element of unpredictability to Cai’s projects, to which participants bring their individual perceptions and approaches — the more people involved, the less controllable the event becomes — feeding into Cai’s fascination with risk, chance and pushing limits. SMoCA (Snake Museum of Contemporary Art): Everything is Museum No.4 2013 Iwaki, Japan, 2013 Commissioned by Cai Studio and the Iwaki Board for the Project to Plant Ten Thousand Cherry Blossom Trees Photograph: Ono Kazuo. Courtesy: Cai Studio Head On 2006 Installation view, Gallery of Modern Art 2013 Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG Collection: Deutsche Bank It is the dynamics between people that provided the inspiration for Head On 2006, the second large-scale installation featured in ‘Falling Back to Earth’. Originally commissioned for an exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Head On took the physical and symbolic presence of the Berlin Wall as its base, representing it as an enormous pane of glass. Leaping toward this transparent barrier is a pack of 99 artificial wolves that appear to slam into the glass and tumble to the floor. To Cai, the wolf represents bravery and ferocity, an animal that derives its strength from unity. 7 Yet, when collective energy is misdirected, such as through the blind following of ideology, disaster can ensue. When exhibited in Berlin, a city shot through with the traces of war, genocide and political division, Head On evoked the city’s chilling legacies of Nazism and the Cold War; however, by tapping into the mechanics of human behaviour, the work is also able to resonate with local histories wherever it is shown. Later presentations of this installation have featured wolves trailing back toward the rear of the group. The animals’ return to the beginning — as if to start the cycle again — suggests an inability to learn from our mistakes, or perhaps a dogged resilience. The paradoxical nature of the wolves’ actions in Head On — tragic and brave, terrible and beautiful — reflects Cai’s fascination with the energies of chaos and contradiction, which he attempts to harness in his work as a kind of material. As can readily be seen in his use of gunpowder, Cai finds creative potential in destruction, another lesson learned from astrophysics and Daoist dialectical thought: In the world we live in today there is so much tension and unease that the idea of destruction, of the destructive potential of something that could be equally pregnant with constructive power, creative power, and healing power, that is very interesting to me . . . We say in Chinese, and English as well, that there is always something that will counterbalance something else — using poison against poison, for instance, or fighting fire with fire — and in this same material you have two sides, opposing but embodied in one. 8