Artist's work explosive

Cai Guoqiang, 43, is a ``magician'' capable of turning almost anything into artwork.

Gunpowder, arrows, clay, Chinese herbal medicine, rocks from Taihu Lake in China, and even a shabby wooden boat from his birthplace in Quanzhou of East China's Fujian Province, work incredibly well in his installation and performance projects that have brought him international recognition as an artist.

Most recently, in 1999, the New York-based Chinese artist won the International Award in the 48th Venice Biennial in Italy, for his project ``Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard.'' Regarded as a supreme honour in the world's most important exhibition of contemporary art, the award was given for the first time to a Chinese artist.

Early last month, he was listed by New York's Daily News among the top 50 most noticeable New Yorkers in the year 2000. He is the only artist and the only Chinese in the list.

Borrowing Your Enemies' Arrows, P.S.1, New York, 1998. Photo: Hiro Ihara Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

Cai's secrets for his successful ``magic'' are what he called ``humanistic high'' and ``artistic language,'' which, more concretely, mean a serious concern for problems facing human beings and global politics as well as the strong visual power of the artwork itself.
His award-winning work in the 48th Venice Biennial was in the form of a replica of ``Rent Collection Courtyard,'' a well known hinese sculpture made in the 1960s in southwestern Sichuan Province showing peasants paying tithes to their feudal lord. But Cai Guoqiang wisely turned the sculpture, which consists of a group of more than 100 clay statues, and the process recreating it into an installation and performance project that has rice connotations and conceptual strength. The 12 tons of clay in the project was modelled not only by himself and his usual assistants, but also by 10 artisan sculptors (one had actually been involved in the original work) invited from the Chinese mainland to the site in Venice.

The work can be regarded as a criticism of the contemporary art system of the capitalist society, where art often surrenders to money and economic control, and a retrospective of the 20th century when sharp social, cultural and artistic conflicts existed amid rapid transformations both in China and the West.

The Western tools and sites as well as the realistic methods applied in recreating the work also demonstrate that the East and the West, modern art and academic art can coexist naturally on the contemporary art stage.

``It does not matter much what materials you use, what does matter is how well you can use them in your art,'' said Cai, who was on a short stay in Beijing recently.

Cai has long been famous as ``the artist of explosion.''

He plays with fire. Or more precisely, he manoeuvres the explosion that is ``a metamorphosis of energy,'' as Japanese art critic Yuko Hasegawa put it.

Under his hands, violence is transformed into beauty.

This can be best seen in his ``Project for Extraterrestials No 9: Foetus Movement'' performed in Han Munden, Germany in 1992, ``No Construction, No Destruction: Bombing the Taiwan Museum of Art'' in Taiwan in 1998, and the most recent project ``I Am the Y2K Bug'' in Vienna, Austria in 1999.

If his explosion work is viewed as a huge abstract painting, gunpowder becomes the paint while the earth and the sky serves as the canvas. The richness of lights and colours during the explosion is extremely exciting and appealing to both the artist and the tides of spectators.

``Gunpowder not only expresses a concept of the universe in the East, but also contains historic memories, which are distilled in Cai's aesthetics of explosion, presenting a converging point of visual beauty, stimulating smell and heartfelt emotion,'' wrote Beijing-based art critic Huang Du.

According to Cai himself, he chooses such materials mainly because he is familiar with them and they have a ``strong cultural significance.''

Cai's interest in using gunpowder, for example, can be related to his hometown, which is famous for the manufacture and use of firecrackers.

In his childhood, the region, dubbed the Fujian Front, was the front base when the situation across the Taiwan Straits tensed, leaving a deep impression of the smell of gunpowder in Cai's memory.

``Later I learned that gunpowder, which was invented in China, has a strong cultural meaning. It was originally related to people's desire for longevity. As a symbol of violence, it has also played an important role in the destruction and reconstruction of history. That's where my inspiration came from.''

As critic Huang Du commented, Cai ``seeks to transform Oriental aesthetics and concepts associated with mystery and philosophy into a concrete modernity with new cultural implications'' -- expanding his own cultural and historical background into the language of contemporary art.

Cai Guoqiang's 1998 work ``Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows,'' which was included in a popular exhibition entitled ``Inside Out: New Chinese Art'' in the United States, has stirred up heated discussions both in China and the United States.

The installation work originated from a classical Chinese story about the wise general Zhuge Liang of the second century who sent boats loaded with thatch figures into the enemy's territory and collected the arrows shot by the enemy soldiers on the boats as his weapon. The story is an accurate depiction of Chinese wisdom and philosophy.

Cai's work is a metaphor for conflicts and absorption between Chinese and Western cultures as well as the harm and utilization in international relations.

China, which is symbolized by the wooden boat with a small red flag, is hurt by thousands of ``arrows'' on the international stage but strategically sticks to its struggle, eventually able to collect all the ``arrows'' as weapon to defeat the enemy.

``In my personal case, the materials and themes of my works are a natural display of my experience and thinking. I never intentionally meet the curiosity of Westerners (about the East). As a matter of fact, globalism and nationalism can often harmonize, just as modernity and tradition can be combined. International masters like Einstein and Tolstoy were national masters also,'' Cai said.

``Some major Western art Museums have collected my works not only because of the Chinese nature in them but, above all, because the works reflected problems of global concern,'' Cai noted.

For the 2000 Whitney Biennial of the United States in this March, Cai Guoqiang, again the only Chinese artist to participate, plans to display an installation work entitled ``How is Your Fengshui?''

Taking the shape of China's Yungang Grottoes and with the assistance of computerized information services, the project is designed to push people to rethink their own fate and the environment they are living in through the means of ``fengshui,'' a Chinese tradition that links people's fate with their habitat.

Well, how is the ``fengshui'' of Cai Guoqiang himself, then?

Cai, born in 1957, graduated from the Department of Stage Design of Shanghai Drama Institute in 1985. Since 1986, he had studied and worked in Japan for eight years where he began to emerge in the international art scene.

In 1995, he moved to New York with a grant from the New York-based Asian Cultural Council, an international organization to promote artistic exchanges between Asian countries and the United States.

Since 1990, he has held 16 solo exhibitions all over the world. He has also participated in about 60 important group exhibitions, which include the 46th, 47th and 48th Venice Biennial.

Cai has great gratitude for his college education in stage design and for his family.

``My education at the drama institute developed my awareness of time, space and teamwork, which are very important in my installation and performance art,'' he said.
Therefore, it seems very natural for him to achieve such great success in the cutting-edge art forms which are relatively new to most Chinese artists of his age.

In his Manhattan house, Cai lives a happy and peaceful life with his wife, who is a Chinese oil painter, and their 10-year-old daughter.

``We are living a life of ordinary people. I always believe that a sincere artist should have the quality of an ordinary person.

``Being so, you are able to discover the essence of things through ordinary scenes in life and let more ordinary people feel close to you, and eventually, be moved by your art.''
Cai said his years of life abroad have benefited him by equipping him with a broader and more open perspective in observing things.

But he accepted that there are many problems puzzling overseas Chinese artists like him, such as the ambiguity of cultural identity.

``Of course, sometimes, it is exactly this ambiguity that leads an artist to the nature of art,'' Cai said.

Date: 01/27/2000
Author: YANG YINGSHI, China Daily staff
Copyright? by China Daily

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