Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese: 蔡国强; born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City and New Jersey.

Biography

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. His father, Cai Ruiqin, was a calligrapher and traditional painter who worked in a bookstore. As a result, Cai Guo-Qiang was exposed early on to Western literature as well as traditional Chinese art forms.

As an adolescent and teenager, Cai witnessed the social effects of the Cultural Revolution first-hand, personally participating in demonstrations and parades himself. He grew up in a setting where explosions were common, whether they were the result of cannon blasts or celebratory fireworks. He also “saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction”. It seems that Cai has channeled his experiences and memories through his numerous gunpowder drawings and explosion events.

In his late teens and early twenties, Cai Guo-Qiang acted in two martial art films, The Spring and Fall of a Small Town and Real Kung Fu of Shaolin. Later intrigued by the modernity of Western art forms such as oil painting, he studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. The experience allowed him a more comprehensive understanding of stage practices and a much-heightened sense for theater, spatial arrangements, interactivity, and teamwork.

Artwork

Cai Guo-Qiang’s practice draws on a variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials. These include fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings, which strongly reflect Mao Zedong’s tenet “destroy nothing, create nothing.” Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment.” Cai was among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.

Early work

Cai’s work is mainly inspired by traditional Chinese culture. It also draws from political topics. As a student, Cai made works consisting of stick-figure or abstract patterns in oil and burnt gunpowder. This giving him a place in the experimental ferment preceding the ’85 New Wave. However, Cai moved to Japan in 1986 as the movement was building.

Projects for Extraterrestrials

In 1990, Cai began Projects for Extraterrestrials, which consisted of using large fireworks and extensive trails of blazing gunpowder that span across landscapes and building surfaces. Site-specific, the projects were implemented in various locations throughout the world. Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (1993) was representative of the nature of the projects as a whole, as it involved an approximately six-mile-long gunpowder fuse that extended beyond the western end of the Great Wall at the edge of the Gobi Desert. The fuse burned for about 15 minutes after it was lit, creating a dragon-like pattern across the dunes that was indicative of China’s imperial and mythological heritage. The title for the series refers to Cai’s inspiration for the project: the belief in a need for a new, higher perspective in which celebrations of pure energy replace earthly conflicts, and gunpowder, the “material fuel” of such conflict, becomes a system that delivers beauty and joy.

Gunpowder works

Cai initially began working with gunpowder drawings and ephemeral sculptures to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature “explosion events”. In 1995, he moved to New York with a grant from the New York-based Asian Cultural Council, an international organization that promotes artistic exchanges between Asian countries and the United States.

In 1998, Cai worked with fashion designer Issey Miyake on a one-off collection for Miyake’s Guest Artist series. For it, Cai arranged gunpowder on white garments in the form of dragons symbolizing life, and set fire to the powder to burn the images into the clothes. Miyake then had the images reproduced as fabric prints for his Pleats Please line.

Awards

He was selected as a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize and won the 48th Venice Biennale International Golden Lion Prize and 2001 CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts. In 2008, he was subject to a large-scale mid-career retrospective, I Want To Believe, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which eventually traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He also gained widespread attention as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In October 2012, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo as the first Chinese national Laureate.[3] In May 2022, he was awarded the John D. Rockefeller III Award by the Asian Cultural Council alongside violinist and educator Midori (violinist). The John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award is given to individuals from Asia or the U.S. who have made significant contributions to the international understanding, practice, or study of the visual or performing arts of Asia.