Explosive Talent

Writer: Olivia McDowell

Explosive Talent0

Explosive Talent1

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe is explosive. Not only because it’s controversial or particularly radical - it isn’t really either of those things. This exhibition is explosive in the literal sense: the image of detonation permeates Cai Guo-Qiang’s entire body of work, appearing in drawings, landscape photography, sculptures and installations. Indeed, the artist himself has expressed a desire to “fill the museum with the power of an explosion”.

Cai’s weapon of choice in achieving this thematic continuity is gunpowder, which he uses as a medium for creating images on canvas, and also a detonator for his own staged “explosion events”, performed in twenty cities around the world and captured in still photography. The result is a body of work instilled with a mild sense of the apocalypse – where even relatively tranquil river scenes and shipwrecks connote some sort of impending doom and destruction. But that is not to say the exhibition is either frightful or melancholic. In fact, it is quite the opposite, for the optimistic title “I Want To Believe” is not a misnomer. Cai’s fixation with explosions is not pyromania gone wrong, it is a devotional deference to the ephemeral, a comment of sorts on the unswervingly optimistic faith we humans tend to place in events we have witnessed but can no longer see: miracles that happen in the blink of an eye and then vanish, leaving us in awe, but empty-handed, without evidence or reason.

“For Cai, art is the experience of believing in something that is unseen, or rather, exists beyond belief,” says Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim Museum’s Senior Curator of Asian Art. And for something that is supposedly impossible to prove, Cai finds myriad references to this common ephemerality, in sources as contrasting as East Asian philosophy and modern scientific theory. I Want To Belive is positively littered with allusions to mythology and folklore, medicinal powers, nuclear apocalypse, UFOs, The Big Bang and Dark Matter.

I Want To Believe is a retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work, and will feature over 80 of the artist’s works, from the 1980s to present, selected from major public and private collections in the US, Europe and Asia. Furthermore, it will be the Guggenheim’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist. Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China in 1957 – a child of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. He has, however, been a resident of New York – perhaps the world’s most fiercely entrepreneurial city – since 1995, and as such, Cai’s work tends to centre on the dichotomous juxtaposition of these two cultures: individual and community, solo endeavour and collaboration, barbarism and culture, localisation and globalisation. These themes feature frequently in his work, and he has often chosen to utilise non-artistic spaces in his artwork.

At the Guggenheim, however, I Want To Believe will reside in nothing but artistic environs. Three levels of the museum’s Rotunda ramp will be dedicated to expressing the indoor-outdoor connection in Cai’s gunpowder drawings and explosion events, and another three levels and three annexe galleries will focus on Cai’s major post-1990s installations. Among the works chosen for the exhibition are Inopportune: Stage One (2004), comprising nine real, full-size cars; a restaging of Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999) for which Cai won the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale, consisting of around fifty clay sculptures, created on site and allowed to crumble in situ; and An Arbitrary History: River (2001) wherein visitors are invited to board a coracle and travel down a real serpentine river installation, under a hanging cloud of Cai’s past sculptures. So if all goes according to plan, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe will be a monumental homage to the ephemeral: an artistic explosion of massive proportions.

Following its New York showing from 22 February 2008, the exhibition is expected to travel to Beijing to coincide with the Olympic Games in August 2008, before moving on to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spring 2009. +

PREVIOUS Stage One, 2004. Site-specific installation to be refabricated in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Rotunda. Nine cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes, Seattle Art Museum. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. 1 Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki, 2004. Excavated wooden boat and porcelain, Caspar H. Schubbe Collection. Photo courtesy Cai Studio. 2 Self Portrait: A Subjugated Soul, 1985-89. Gunpowder and oil on canvas, 167 x 118 cm. Collection of Leo Shih, photo courtesy Cai Studio.