Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

62 63 Bridge Crossing 1999 Installation view, ‘The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999 Bamboo, laser sensors, rainmaking device, aluminium boats Photograph: Richard Stringer Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Research Library The Brisbane project of 1996 brought together equivalences between the Chinese dragon and the Indigenous Australian Rainbow Serpent, and captured a dimension in Cai’s work in which he aims to bridge cultures through the recognition of significant shared values and mores. This was also the premise for his 1999 work for the third APT, titled Bridge Crossing , where he constructed a magnificent bamboo bridge across the Gallery’s iconic Watermall. This methodology, running through much of Cai’s practice, is only the first step in understanding the more complex aspects of his work. The subtitle for the 1996 work, ‘A Myth Glorified or Feared’, alludes to further propositions, indicating the complex emotional entanglement that glory and fear together suggest. Whose myths are gloried in, whose are feared, and for what purpose? Here, Cai makes us consider our cultural and historical position as he draws on figures such as the dragon and Rainbow Serpent — simultaneously terrifying creatures and agents of creation and transformation — to embrace the idea that positive and negative forces must be gathered together to achieve balance. Cai’s use of animal symbolism enables him to tap into rich seams of cultural memory that cut across national borders yet remain specific to local sites and histories. Of the installations created since 2001 that use life-size replicas of animals, the two works Inopportune: Stage Two 2004 (made for his solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in the United States) and Head On (made two years later, for his Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition in Berlin, Germany) provide a decisive counterpoint to the ideas at the heart of Heritage . Both Inopportune: Stage Two and Head On are responses to the global reverberations post-9/11 in which the trauma of terrorism and its attendant violence, devastation and tragedy are implicated. 12 Inopportune: Stage Two features nine tigers bristling with arrows, dispersed across the exhibition space in a dramatic tableau. The scholar Robert Pogue Harrison asserts that ‘ Inopportune is an artwork that erupts from out of the core of our bewildered age’. 13 The instinctive reaction when encountering this work is that of witnessing a disturbing, yet compelling, image of terror and pain. These are not images that any of us have ever seen in the real world, yet here they are, creations imbued with a chillingly repulsive splendour. Inopportune: Stage Two 2004 (installation view and detail) ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Long Scroll’, Shawinigan Space, National Gallery of Canada, Québec, 2006 9 life-sized replicas of tigers, arrows and mountain stage prop Collection: Kröller-Műller Museum, Otterlo Photograph: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa