Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

87 Brown Lake, North Stradbroke Island © Beth Wode http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethwode This intimation gleams most alluringly in Cai’s latest work, Heritage 2013, which is premiered to the world in the Gallery of Modern Art exhibition entitled, tellingly, ‘Falling Back to Earth’. In the development phase of Heritage , Cai has made no secret of the fact that his recent explorations of Australia have brought him avidly back to an intimate, grounded commitment to the invisible energies of the spinning planet, so vivaciously brittle, which is our birthright and urgent responsibility. He was moved and changed by his encounter with the ancient, abiding resilience of special portions of Australian nature, particularly with the marvel that is the white sands and pristine lakes of North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah). One of Stradbroke’s lakes, Brown Lake (Bummeira), is a profound ecosystem which, hydrologists estimate, has maintained its dynamic yet exquisitely delicate balance of past–present–future fertility all through the last 7500 years. 6 To be more precise, the Brown Lake ecosystem has maintained itself only as long as the human beings associated with it have known not to foul the waters; only as long as the human culture within this natural, terrestrial system has been deeply implicated within the environment; only as long as the people in the environment have behaved as part of the time-soaked system of the lake and its environs. Not above it. Not in charge of it. Not exploiting it as a resource in service to humanity. Here in Australia, even despite the damage brought by incursive European mentalities, human beings have been successfully deep inside the environment continuously for far longer than in parts of the world that are conventionally considered ‘ancient’. Cai has seen how there is a singular human culture — the Indigenous one — still prevailing here, that has remained inside and inseparable from the natural world. Looking at Heritage , one senses that Cai has been humbled and inspired by this revelation, that he has been lifted up by it but also brought happily down to earth again after so many years spent imagining extraterrestrial vantage points. So, ancient Indigenous Australia has affected the artist deeply. But, equally, Cai has been thrilled and radically refocused by his encounters in the remarkable, polyglot experiment of recombinant ethnicity that is contemporary, multicultural Australia. He has found in Australia a set of obligations and opportunities — natural and social — that had dropped out of sight for him, if indeed they had ever been evident, during his sojourns in China, Japan and America. Meditating on the distinctiveness of Australia, evoking how it is other-worldly in Patrick White’s sense, Heritage is infused with invisibility and it is primed to explode, but in a manner exquisitely unlike the charge in Cai’s extraterrestrial gunpowder projects. Pad quietly into the hushed ambit of this spectacular but delicate new work. Note the sandy verge, enigmatically unmarked by any footprints of recent events. Or to say it another, more imaginative way: the sand is marked only by the generous fullness of time in all its possibilities, not by the evidence of just one layer from recent history. Note also the paradoxical tension in the lake water — so prone to disturbance, yet gentle, languorous and inviting, too, with its subliminal undulations caused by the subtle rhythm of time’s tiniest pulse, materialised in the form of a single water drop barely enlivening the lake surface — dripping from above again and again and again. You can see how the tension and languor linger for each other in the water; they are implicit and invisibly available to each other: like Yin and Yang yielding to each other, like the past, present and future lulling and cajoling one another. Megan Cope Australia b.1982 Fluid Terrain 2013 Vinyl and synthetic polymer paint on glass Courtesy: The artist and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Research Library This site-specific work by Indigenous artist Megan Cope was commissioned for the exhibition ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 2013. It is based on historical military maps of Brisbane and Moreton Bay, including North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah), and features local Aboriginal place names and a coastline based on a projected five-metre rise in sea levels, reflecting both the long history of Aboriginal occupation and the constantly shifting morphology of the area.