If you go to one museum between now and May 28th, make sure it is the Guggenheim. Chinese artist Cai Guo-Quiang’s exhibit called I Want To Believe is nothing short of mind blowing. The reviews have been universally strong and far more detailed than anything I can offer:
- Newsday: If it weren’t so massive, the arrangement of nine full-sized automobiles hung from the top of the Guggenheim’s spiral, might look like a mobile dangling
- NewYorker: Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese installation and pyrotechnic artist, recently told me that as a child he had a recurrent
- New York Times: Cars and Gunpowder and Plenty of Noise – New York Times The Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of the work of the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang is nothing if not action packed. The galleries are so rife with the
The guy paints with gun powder. He suspends hurling wolves, exploding cars and arrow-riddled ships. You gotta see it to believe it. And for you Olympic fans, Cai Guo-Qiang is responsible for the pyrotechnics at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Games (August 8-25, 2008).
It’s been a while I haven’t seen any Chinese art that makes eye wide-opened. As we all know, Chinese art is booming in the past couple years (and still). This fact has a big impact to Chinese local artists. Many artists start to massively produce their art like the factory line to meet the big requirement of the market. In the meanwhile, many artists start to make Chinese Chinese art to meet the market’s interests, which sometimes results to overemphasize on artists’ Chinese identity and historical issues. Different from this perspective, Cai Guo-Qiang’s art works distinctly present him as a self. There’s a nice blend of his Chinese roots and universal language (symbols and metaphors) in his art works that creates a channel for the universal dialogue. In stead of imposing his Chinese identity and social issues on his viewers, he steps back and constructs ideas in a big picture, and presents it in his poetic and unique own way. Like those gunpowder performance and paintings, he brings viewers to connect to the universe in a different perspective, both seen and unseen worlds. His installations are like timeless storytelling of the social issues that has been haunted in every Chinese mind. I admire the way that he’s be true to himself and seizes his childhood passion for gunpowder and expands it to a meaningful realm: his art pursue. The conflict and destruction that gunpowder creates, and the ephemeral nature of it also add poetic and melancholy aura to his works, which makes these art pieces profound and unforgettable.
To see is to believe, really. Be sure to spare some time for these gunpowder performance documentation videos!