Cai Guo-Qiang,The Century with Mushroom Clouds, Projects for the 20th Century, 1996
Cai Guo-Qiang’s I Want to Believe, currently at the Guggenheim in New York, provides for compelling answers to many of the uncertainties of art production today. By combining concepts of eastern philosophy, childhood-like wonders of communism, and pure pyrotechnic mastery Cai has enveloped the interior of the Guggenheim in a sweeping fashion. GM cars hang from floor to ceiling in the atrium, there are massive installations with pieces as wide ranging from an ancient Chinese ship hull, to a piece entitled “Head On” which involves ninety-nine life-size wolf sculptures that climb around one rotunda of the museum before crashing into a Plexiglas wall. Even more remarkable is Cai’s signature work as a “gunpowder artist,” in which the artist applies the pure energy of explosives on canvas and site-specific installations (which are displayed in the show via video)
What is truly spectacular about the show once you get beyond the sublime use of the space is the consistency in which it is applied. The pieces are loaded with the social commentary of traditional Chinese folklore and heroes such as Genghis Khan. At the same time the works delve into more latent issues of Chinese identity such as the last fifty years of communist China, Mao Zedong, and the Cultural Revolution. Cai’s own beginning in art took place during the shaping of the Cultural Revolution in which he began to study Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy as a boy. He remembers his father during that time owning a bookstore, in which he secretly gave Cai copies of “Death of a Salesman” and “Waiting for Godot” when most western books had been banned.
As a global artist, Cai is most effective when gunpowder is involved. The use of explosive material mirrors the idea of terror both in contemporary times and also historically in ancient China involving the spectacle of fireworks. War and power are constantly circling throughout the exhibition but Cai addresses them directly in two pieces that involve gunpowder. The first piece The Century with Mushroom Clouds: project for the 20th Century, is presented at four sites (a nuclear test site in Nevada, Michel Heizer’s Double Negative, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and lower Manhattan) where Cai recreates the iconic symbol of a mushroom cloud. The second uses the Great Wall of China in a way that once again specifically addresses the land-art movement of the nineteen-seventies. The method he employs by detonating charges in the ground extending ten thousand meters from one end of the wall comments on growing global presence of China on world affairs.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004
The work as a whole takes a lot to develop from vision to reality, as it is largely the product of biennials, and grants. One of the successes of the exhibition is that the work is being presented during an increasingly commodifiable period in the art market. For much of the work to be fully realized Cai must employ technicians and trades people in order to produce works that are mostly specifically created for museums and site-specific experiments. That is not to say however that the gunpowder drawings are not as successful due to being more traditional, they are some of the best the show has to offer. In totality, Cai is part of a trend that comments on the politics of society without being totally restrained by it. That notion is comforting, when much in the world is so unsettling.