Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

80 Revelations. Quick shifts of consciousness. Startling changes in perspective. Cai Guo-Qiang has pursued them methodically throughout his career. Hence his persistent interest in the transformative energies that zing through the medical sciences of the Chinese ancients; hence his enthusiasm for the kinetic flourishes that enliven the best calligraphy; hence his devotion to the geomantic verve of feng shui and the bright detonation of gunpowder. Cai focuses intensity, drawing vivid images to prominence and pushing obfuscation away. ‘I have a lot of curiosity,’ he has observed, ‘about unseen force[s] and invisible things.’ 2 Always looking to expose the concealed urges that give form to our full, befuddling world, he strives to make the ineffable imaginable. There’s no denying Cai’s projects tend to be spectacular. He brings the wow factor. Extending the Great Wall of China with a blazing lateral flare, for example, or composing a massive metallic freeze-frame that permanently levitates the lethal starburst of a terrorist’s car bomb, Cai can seem like a modern-day PT Barnum, conjuring hoopla with a bold imagination empowered by his far-reaching celebrity. Belying his courtesy and courtliness, he can appear paradoxically like some mountebank trickster, or a global magician. What to make of these puzzles about him? Let’s define ‘magic’ as a set of ingenious techniques finessed by an expert who wants to shift the observer’s mindset from blunt scepticism to open-minded wonderment. Now, let’s propose that Cai practises an artful magic. This helps us see better how determinedly and methodically he works to spritz common sense and to give the dull world a little galvanising dazzle. He offers something as illuminating as it is thrilling. Sometimes it’s chilling too, as in the example of the car bombs where he gives in an image a provocation to suspend judgement for a cooling moment so we can really look into these abominations, really try to understand the animus within the behaviour of the bombers. He clears the occluded aspects of existence by rattling our lenses of habitual interpretation and censure so we will not settle complacently into mundane subsistence. ‘Mundane’ means literally ‘of the world’. It can be used as a synonym, of course, for ‘ordinary’. Cai’s works are always of the world, but they are set invariably at a provocative angle to the ordinary. For the deep codes of the world are anything but mundane. Investigating the likelihood that something wondrous subtends mundanity: this is where an openness to mystery can operate, and it’s where Cai creates his work. Inopportune: Stage One 2004 Exhibition copy, ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe’, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2008 Cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes Collection: Seattle Art Museum. Gift of Robert M Arnold, in honour of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Photograph: Hiro Ihara. Courtesy: Cai Studio [T]here is an unseen order . . . our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting our selves thereto. 1 William James Deep water time Ross Gibson Try an experiment. Imagine a world where any one of these three notions — the mystical, the political or the magical — necessarily contains the other two; now think of an artist seeking revelations in such a world. This brings you closer to grasping Cai’s enterprise. It’s what makes him much more than a mere trickster. As he looks for ways to delve into everything that is present but not obvious (seeking how ‘to go beyond social systems and boundaries’, as he puts it), Cai engages in a process that he describes as a ‘time tunnel’. 3 He lures next and past moments into the present — or, more precisely, he lures them into the present imagination of the viewer — so that all the histories and future possibilities in matter and moments might be apprehensible as part of the ever-emerging instant that is now. Consider, for example, Cai’s ‘Projects for Extraterrestrials’ — more than 30 enormous, gunpowder- fuelled explosions — that he staged all around the world throughout the 1990s. More particularly, to illuminate Cai’s conception of time travel as a type of enhanced vision, consider the gunpowder itself. Something is poised — like a dragon, like thermodynamic urgency wanting to perform calligraphy — in the chemistry of this black-magical dust. In this earthy matter, the vivid future explosion is invisible, but present even as it is latent. At another moment in time, when the conditions are right, this exact same lax powder can flare to display its other brighter reality. Time brings this mystery to revelation, makes manifest this possibility. Each explosion is sudden magic used to astonish and befuddle the citizens of the mundane. With gunpowder, you can travel through time to see one of the more paroxysmic, invisible futures of the seemingly inert world. Then the clattering outburst settles down again and your memory carries both the dazzling detonation and the deceptively peaceable quietude that prevailed beforehand, rhymed now with a doubtful calm that’s freshly present in the aftermath. From the gunpowder, you have extracted other states, heretofore unrealised, invisible states. You have learned that change waits in all matter and moments.