Guggenheim Museum Presents ‘Cai Guo-Qiang’

Designed as a spectacular site-specific installation within the museum’s galleries, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark rotunda, the exhibition will present a chronological and thematic survey that charts the artist’s creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings made from gunpowder fuses and explosive powders laid on paper and ignited; explosion events which are site-specific fireworks displays, documented by videos, photographs, and preparatory drawings; large-scale installations; and social projects, wherein the artist works with local communities to create an art event or exhibition site, documented by photographs. Featuring over 80 works from the 1980s to the present—selected from major public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia—the exhibition will illuminate Cai’s significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism.

The exhibition is organized by Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, in close collaboration with the artist. Following its New York opening, the exhibition is expected to travel to Beijing to coincide with the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, and to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in spring 2009.

“Cai Guo-Qiang is a transnational artist of extraordinary creative vision,” stated Thomas Krens. “The Guggenheim is pleased to present Cai’s retrospective, which examines the full scale and complexity of his art and science of transformation.” Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, in 1957. He has lived and worked outside of China since 1986, first in Japan and subsequently, beginning in 1995, in New York. Cai Guo-Qiang has been appointed director of visual and special effects and a core member of the creative team for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics in the Herzog & de Meuron stadium, which an estimated one billion people will see televised globally.

The retrospective focuses on the development of his signature innovation—harnessing gunpowder to create powerful explosions resulting in drawings, created at the moment of the blast ignition, which blur the boundaries between drawing and performance. Three entire levels of the rotunda’s ramp will be dedicated to illustrating how this practice coheres with the indoor and outdoor explosion events that Cai has produced in over twenty cities around the world—challenging and expanding the possibilities for ephemeral, site-specific art. Since the early 1990s, he has also created ambitious installations that have won critical acclaim. Often conceived as site-specific interactive artworks, they wittily engage with, and poetically transcend, the cultural and political mores of a given venue. Participation is key to many of these installations, and local communities are frequently involved in their organization and realization. Several of Cai’s most important installations will occupy another three levels of the ramp and two annex galleries. Major works that are anticipated to be featured in the exhibition include a version of Inopportune: Stage One (2004), comprised of multiple cars that seem to explode while suspended in the central void of the rotunda; and a restaging of Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999), for which the artist won the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale, and An Arbitrary History: River (2001), in which boats glide along a fabricated river under an assembly of past works. The Guggenheim exhibition will examine Cai’s radical methodology within the context of international postmodern art practices, social and geopolitical critiques, and East Asian aesthetics and philosophy.

Central to Cai’s conceptual approach to art making is a utopian and aspirational idealism, aimed at connecting the human, natural and cosmic realms through tapping into what he terms the “unseen energy fields and meridian lines” that are the basic life force of the universe. Cai’s diverse creative expression has a unifying aspirational aspect: To alert humanity to a state of being, at once primordial and futuristic, which feels awe, however fleeting, at the spectacle of pure life force. The series title of Cai’s early gunpowder drawing and explosion event works, Project for Extraterrestrials, refers to the artist’s interest in inverting the human with the extraterrestrial view of the planet, thereby connecting his audience, conceptually at least, to the larger cosmos.

The Guggenheim Museum has a special history with Cai Guo-Qiang. In 1996, he was selected as a finalist for the museum’s inaugural Hugo Boss Prize, which is awarded to extraordinary creative figures in contemporary international art. His participation in the Guggenheim’s accompanying exhibition was a catalyst for Cai’s international recognition, and the work he presented, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, is among the highlights of the Guggenheim’s contemporary art collection. The 2008 retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang is a significant addition to the museum’s highly acclaimed one-person exhibitions and performances dedicated to contemporary artists, which in recent years have included Marina Abramovi?, Matthew Barney, Daniel Buren, and Zaha Hadid. The forthcoming retrospective is also important to the Guggenheim Museum’s initiative to further integrate Asian art into its exhibition, collection, and education programs. -- www.guggenheim.org