Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

50 51 This insight is not presented with a positive or negative judgement; it simply is . Writer Elias Canetti’s observation of the destructive crowd, as it smashes houses and noisy, fragile objects, is that ‘the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person’. 9 The wolves may be suicidally hurtling to their doom, but they look splendidly free once they make the leap. The tragedy is that this wall won’t smash; Cai’s view is that it is the invisible walls that are the hardest to destroy. 10 Cai is able to balance the narrative dimension of Head On with an extraordinary visual impact and physical grace. The installation is constructed like an unfurling scroll, with the wolves cascading in an elegant arc across the gallery space. Cai has spoken of the importance of creating a sense of aesthetic distance in his works — we are able to appreciate them as art, not simply as a representation of reality. He has credited this approach to his time spent in Japan (from 1986 to 1995) when he first became known widely as an artist. 11 It was there that he came across the work of artists of the Mono-ha (‘School of Things’) movement, such as Lee Ufan, who explored the contingent interdependence of materials and objects with their environment, emphasising Asian philosophy rather than Euro–American avant-garde ideas. As Cai says: The aspect of my work that’s been most heavily influenced by Japan is the great importance I place on materials and form. For example, if creating a piece in which a wolf runs into a wall and collapses, a Chinese artist would probably express it violently and terrifyingly with lots of blood dripping everywhere, but I’d concentrate on the beauty of the wolf and the poetic feeling of the lines, and show the wolf getting up and running away after collapsing . . . I’m interested in showing more of the aesthetics and philosophy behind the work. 12 Lee Ufan South Korea/Japan b.1936 Installation view, APT 2002, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane 2002 In foreground: Relatum 2002 Iron plates, stones 57 x 536 x 526cm (installed) The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2002 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899–1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery For the third work in the exhibition, Heritage 2013, Cai has further refined his principle of aesthetic distance, creating a mirage-like installation of vast scale. While grounded in his experience of visiting North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah) off the coast of Brisbane, particularly the tannin- infused Brown Lake (Bummeira), the work presents a visual allegory. Expanding on his mental image of Queensland as a last paradise — with its unique environment and rich multicultural population, far from the conflicts and challenges of the continental world 13 — Cai has created a gigantic tableau featuring 99 replicas of animals from across the globe, slightly larger than life- size, that appear to be drinking from a pond. Lion and gazelle, bear and elk, dingo and kangaroo stand peacefully side-by-side, their differences erased for the moment. Cai enhances this sense of dreamlike illusion by creating a tension between the frozen instant of the animals in the act of drinking, and the temporal beat of a drip of water that continually disrupts the pond’s surface and the silence of the room. Cai’s charged enactment of an idyllic pool brings to mind American writer Henry David Thoreau’s description of Walden Pond, the rural lake where Thoreau retreated in 1845 for two years to live a simple life, like a modern literati: ‘A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above.’ 14 The crowd in Heritage is diverse yet tranquil, in contrast to the uniform and kinetic pack of Head On . Cai’s vision of human nature here is utopian, where all types come together in a shared space and accommodate each other. Yet, the work has, as he says, a superficial beauty — the mirage can’t be taken at face value and we don’t know what to believe. The Australia of the imagination is betrayed by its actuality, where there are tensions between people, brutal histories and environmental damage. The work’s prelapsarian splendour conceals what Cai describes as a ‘hidden tragedy’, in which the harmony that binds the animals together can never be attained in the real world. In a sense, Heritage could be seen as an analogy of the moment before the Big Bang, when everything was unified until it dispersed throughout the cosmos. As with Eucalyptus , nature is displayed as a fully formed entity that is somehow closed off to us; we can’t participate in it, but can only experience it from a distance. Cai seems to be suggesting that we need to find our own way to it, to come home, to fall back to earth. Heritage (detail) 2013 Commissioned for ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth’. Purchased 2013 with funds from the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery