Cai Guo-Qiang

▪ 2009

born Dec. 8, 1957, Quanzhou City, Fujian province, China

 Propelled into a premiere position with his 2008 one-man retrospective at New York City's Guggenheim Museum, pyrotechnical artist Cai Guo-Qiang was the first Chinese artist ever to be so honoured. His show, “I Want to Believe,” immediately confronted the viewer with a dramatic installation piece entitled Inopportune: Stage One (2004). For the work, Cai used nine actual cars suspended at various angles to evoke a sort of stop-action image of a car bombing, complete with timed sprays of lights. Calling Cai “one of the most powerful artists operating anywhere in the world,” Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens opined that the cars suspended in the rotunda “may be the best artistic transformation of the Frank Lloyd Wright space that we've ever seen.” The show's other pieces included several of Cai's signature gunpowder drawings and paintings and a re-creation of his agitprop reference to similar pieces he had seen in his boyhood years. Even so, “I Want to Believe” barely held a candle to Cai's other major performance of the year: he was appointed to the post of director of visual and special effects for the ceremonial events bracketing the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

      Cai's father—a painter, historian, and bookstore owner—was somewhat ambivalent toward Mao Zedong and the new Chinese society. He encouraged his son to read the forbidden Western classics despite his support of Marxist thinking. The father continued to practice the traditional art of calligraphy but used it to reproduce Mao's epigrams. The younger Cai honed his sense of the dramatic at the Shanghai Institute of Drama, which he attended from 1981 to 1985. After graduating with a degree in stage design, he made plans to leave China.

      From 1986 to 1995 he lived in Japan, learning Japanese and refining his control over his chosen artistic medium, gunpowder. It was in this choice that the ambivalence he had absorbed at his father's side seemed most clearly to surface. Gunpowder was an ancient Chinese invention and a thoroughly traditional substance. Yet it was not a traditional medium for art and thus was a perfect material for expressing both respect and frustration, for embodying both the violence and the beauty that became his trademark.

      In 1995 Cai moved to New York City. There he continued to make a kind of performance art that New York Times critic Roberta Smith labeled “gunpowder land art,” events recorded on videotape. He also created drawings made from gunpowder residue, some of which he altered by painting on them. In addition, he began, like a surprising number of other contemporary Chinese artists, to reveal a gift for creating large-scale installations. Cai's works of this sort included groupings of stuffed animals, sometimes tigers pierced with arrows or packs of snarling wolves hurtling toward an invisible barrier. Though some critics found his work somewhat hollow and less than original, others were riveted by his contradictory vision and his unquestioned instinct for the dramatic.

Kathleen Kuiper

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