Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

61 60 Cai Guo-Qiang and volunteers creating the gunpowder drawing Nine Dragon Wall (Drawing for Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No.28) 1996 Queensland Performing Arts Centre car park, Brisbane, 20 September 1996 Photograph: Reina Irmer Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Research Library In 1996, Cai Guo-Qiang created the gunpowder drawing Nine Dragon Wall (Drawing for Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No.28) for ‘The Second Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT2) at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. This was the first time he had worked with the Gallery (and in Australia), and it was to be the beginning of a long, fruitful relationship culminating in ‘Falling Back to Earth’, his first major solo exhibition in Australia. For that 1996 project, Cai used the Brisbane River as a conceptual metaphor and physical location for his explosion event Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No.28 . Drawing on principles of geomancy and feng shui, which seek the attainment of physical and spiritual harmony between a person and their environment, he constructed a complex series of interrelated works which included a gunpowder explosion event for the Brisbane River, which unfortunately was not realised due to a fire in the fireworks factory. 8 Among the other works of this project was the powerful and beautiful nine-part gunpowder drawing, now in the Gallery’s Collection. The dragon has a long history as a venerated creature in Chinese mythology. A divine creature associated with water, its capacity for transformation ensures its power as a celestial symbol. The traditional form of the Chinese dragon is an amalgam of characteristics drawn from nine other creatures: camel head, cow ears, demon eyes, stag horns, snake-like neck, clam belly, eagle claws, tiger feet and carp scales covering the body. As an emblem of imperial power in China, the dragon has been used since the Qing Empire adopted it in 1862. Following the 1911 revolution, and especially during the height of Maoism, this association with imperialism and the feudal past resulted in official distancing of its use. 9 Through the 1980s and 1990s, however, the dragon once again emerged as a popular emblem in China. 10 Many of Cai’s works have cited the dragon, both as an inspirational source for its cultural associations and to draw attention to the power of transformation. The Rainbow Serpent is one of a group of highly significant ancestral beings that hold spiritual knowledge and power in Australian Aboriginal creation stories. Anthropologist Howard Morphy describes the implications of this power as an important method of understanding the significance of place and space in Aboriginal society: Every part of the landscape is associated with ancestral beings, and people’s rights vary according to the links they are acknowledged to have with these ancestral beings . . . The whole of creation, all of human life, is mapped on the landscape, to which ancestral beings are inextricably connected. 11 Chen Rong Chinese, first half of the 13th century Nine dragons (detail) Chinese, Southern Song Dynasty, dated 1244 Ink and colour on paper Image: 46.2 x 958.4cm; Overall: 46.8 x 1496.5cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Francis Gardner Curtis Fund, 17.1697 Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston