Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SESSION 5 : RENEGOTIATI NG TRADITION RENEGOTIATI NG TRADITION Cai Guo Qiang I will show a video and then try to avoid too much theorising by showing you a series of slides relating to my work and its development, and try through that to introduce you to some of the ideas I've been working around. VIDEO This is a work I produced last year in Taiwan. It is the booming of the Taiwan Museum of Art. There's a balloon in the sky. The fire starts in the sky and then falls earthwards, shooting straight into the gallery itself, and then it comes up, comes down, shoots in and out of the gallery a number of times . The idea, apart from the explosion of course, is also creating a dragon that entwines the gal lery and explodes through it and around it. And this of course is the site of the explosion inside the gallery itself. And then trying to create the effect of a dragon coiled around a pillar - it circulates around the pillars and then comes out through the main entrance . That was for me the most tense creation I've done involving pyrotechn ics . One of the reasons I was particularly tense about this performance work was that just a couple of hours before igniting the explosions the Vice Provincial Leader of Taiwan Province & Taipei City rang up the head of the gallery and said 'If anyth ing goes wrong, we'll deal with you tomorrow.' Then of course naturally the head of the gallery told me about this warn ing, and I told the head of the gallery, 'It's your decision after all, if you don't want to proceed it's up to you .' He said 'Well , it's really the choice if I decide to stop now I have to face the thousands of people who've gathered outside, all of those reporters, all of those TV stations, all of those cameras. You tel l me, 'Do I dare to do that?' Thankfully the whole work went off as expected and planned . Sadly however, in another time and in another place, that is here, three years ago and again the day before yesterday, unfortunately my work hasn't been completed twice in a row. Thankfully however the head of the gallery wasn't under the incredible pol itical pressure that that gallery d irector in Taiwan was. I felt incredibly guilty and sad that neither work was able to be completed as planned , nonetheless I have been able to get some sleep because the political pressure wasn't that incredibly intense. I MAGE This was the outline plan for my 1 996 work that was to take place here. I was going to create a pyrotechnical dragon along the Brisbane River, and this is the outl ine plan for that project. This was an 1 8 metre long work that was done as preparation for that much larger work, and everyone involved in the Gallery came out and saw what was involved with putting this experiment together. This is the work after the explosion , the burning along the paper, and it was then hung up. The work that we produced as an experiment for the larger exterior work d id come together inside, but the major river dragon was not real ised . In the future if I d id another project here I would not do a smaller version and a larger version, but just do the one version of the artwork. The reason in the end that the 1 996 work failed was not because of our own technical problems, but rather as we were finalising the work the fireworks factory where all the materials for the river dragon were stored exploded and the whole work was destroyed in situ rather than destroyed as it was planned to be. However from that failure and the destruction of those materials of the unrealised project I decided to create another smaller exhibit of the remnants of the d ragon not realised, and I put that on d isplay in Japan shortly thereafter. The main responsibility of the failure of the river dragon this time is mine. The plan was to create a blue river dragon . The dragon was to be created with blue flame in each of the 99 76