Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

58 59 The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No.14 , realised at the Pacific Ocean, offshore from Numanouchi to Yotsukura Beach, Iwaki, 7 March 1994 Commissioned by Iwaki City Art Museum Photograph: Kazuo Ono. Courtesy: Cai Studio When considering the last 25 years of his career, from the first gunpowder explosion project Human Abode: Project for Extraterrestrials No.1 1989 in Tokyo to the commissioned work Heritage 2013 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Cai has consistently explored the interaction of violence, beauty and the human condition. The idea that an act of destruction is also a cathartic, creative action underpins much of his work. The particular trajectory of his life echoes this dynamic spirit. Growing up in China in one of its most turbulent periods, migrating to Japan in the mid 1980s, then to New York in the mid 1990s, and participating on the global stage as one of the giants of contemporary Chinese and international art, have given Cai rich perspectives on processes of migration, globalisation and cross-cultural politics. The question of how Cai’s works are then contextualised and understood is much discussed, and the reductive binary of ‘Chinese contemporary’ versus ‘international global’ is unproductive. Cai’s is one of the insistent artist voices whose practices have brought a broad range of cultural memory to the development of contemporary art from the mid twentieth century. His artist colleague Lee Ufan, in his 1994 essay ‘For a new site of expression’, recognised the inherent restrictiveness in using only the framework of the Western modernist canon to think through contemporary art: In the West, there has arisen a sense of crisis and a growing tendency to re-evaluate modernism. Many of the leading artists, who have been aiming at new forms of expression for some time, are attempting to place themselves in a different context (or no context). Obvious examples include Joseph Beuys, Michael Heizer, Nam Jun[e] Paik, Ilya Kabakov, and Cai Guo-Qiang, but are there any artists aware of the issues and attempting to move forward who are not critical of modernism? Not surprisingly, the European philosophers and cultural anthropologists, who have attacked logo- centrism and European exclusiveness and recognised the value of diverse forms of thought from different regions of the world, speak of crossover and nomadism in a multilayered and diverse world. 5 Human Abode: Project for Extraterrestrials No.1 , realised at Fussa Minami Park and Kumagawa Shrine, Fussa, Tokyo, 11 November 1989 Commissioned by ‘Tama River Fussa Outdoor Art Exhibition’ Photograph: Wataru Kai. Courtesy: Cai Studio Human Abode was made in November 1989 on the banks of the Tama River in Tokyo, not long after the Tiananmen Square protests that took place in Beijing throughout April, May and into early June of that year. The protests were violently crushed on 4 June by the military. Cai’s project consisted of a rudimentary tent construction using waxed canvas, feathers, tree branches and rope (Cai later described it as a yurt, recalling the structure’s association with nomadic peoples), 6 which he detonated using gunpowder. The residue was then installed at the Kumagawa Shrine and remained there on view for a week. If his first gunpowder project was made as a visceral response to exile and loss, Cai has also said that this work was ‘about passing spiritually from this world to another dimension’. 7 Indeed, much of Cai’s work responds to real events in the contemporary world; he transforms these often destructive, violent actions into creative, cathartic, artistic acts. With the exception of Human Abode , the important suite of gunpowder projects that followed through the 1990s has always been related to the various sites in which they were staged, and were based on making connections between peoples and across cultures, while always carrying the subtitle Project for Extraterrestrials .