Guggenheim Museum Presents Cai Guo-Qiang " I Want to Believe "

Saturday, 23 February 2008 11:12

NEW YORK, NY - Opening February 22, 2008, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present the most comprehensive survey to date of the innovative body of work of Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced tsai gwo chang). This exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe is organized by the Guggenheim and represents the museum’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist. Designed as a spectacular site-specific installation within the museum’s galleries, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s 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; site-specific explosion events; large-scale installations; and social projects.
 
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.  This exhibition is made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, which promotes the understanding of Chinese arts and culture worldwide.

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. Assistant curators Monica Ramirez-Montagut and Sandhini Poddar have provided additional support. 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,” said 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.”

I Want to Believe ™ is used with permission of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Caroline Pfohl-Ho, President of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, said, “The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation is committed to fostering and supporting Chinese arts and culture worldwide. We are delighted to support this first retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most important living Chinese artists and a true global citizen. We share with Cai a similar vision about the importance of creative opportunities for everyone and a commitment to using art for social commentary. Through this exhibition and the educational programs, we hope to help cultivate a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese art and its creative potential for people around the world.”

Cai Guo-Qiang is internationally recognized as an artist, curator, and creator of large-scale explosion events, who has been active in exhibitions, biennales, and public celebrations around the world for the last twenty years. Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, and a resident of New York since 1995, Cai is acclaimed as a bold originator of new forms of art that use gunpowder to create large-scale “gunpowder drawings” and site-specific “explosion events.” Since the mid-1990s, Cai’s practice has expanded to include interactive installations that often recuperate signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of artifice and nature, barbarism and culture, localization and globalization. The implications of Cai’s methodology across all media relate his work to conceptual art, performance art, and ephemeral Land Art, but extend each of those practices towards a radically new matrix.

Responding to commissions across the globe, Cai’s work requires collaboration with tens or even hundreds of workers, including his project team, art-world volunteers and local laborers. As a child of China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, Cai explores the relationship between the individual and the collective society. His interrogation of the contradiction between contemporary Chinese individualism and collectivism has set his collaborative practice apart from his contemporaries in the west. As a direct development of this practice, Cai has recently produced so-called “social projects” which include a series of museums in remote, non-art sites like bunkers, where he assumes the role of curator and invites the participation of artists and the local public alike. Cai’s subversive implementation of non-art spaces and local communities involves extraordinary logistical negotiations, relies on the artist’s considerable charisma and mobilization skills, and is infused with an idealism that aspires to claim the public realm as a site for democratic art and power. Cai’s current project in his role as Art 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 will reach an estimated four billion television viewers, is designed as an art spectacle of unprecedented mass outreach.

The retrospective is designed as a site-specific installation, whose progression of works and compressed aspect will “fill the museum with the power of an explosion.” in Cai’s words. The exhibition focuses on the development and expression of Cai Guo-Qiang’s signature innovation—harnessing gunpowder to create powerful explosions, both as gunpowder drawings on canvas and paper and as explosion events. Three levels of the Guggenheim Rotunda’s ramp will be dedicated to illustrating how the gunpowder drawings cohere 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. Several of Cai’s most important installations that he has created since the early 1990s will occupy another three levels of the Rotunda and three Annex Galleries.

The exhibition’s subtitle, “I Want to Believe,” exposes the brilliant ambiguities at the core of Cai’s wide-ranging artistic practice. Cai’s object titles often allude to extraterrestrials. “For Cai, art is the experience of believing in something that is unseen, or rather, exists beyond belief,” remarks Alexandra Munroe. Along with extraterrestrials and UFOs, his work freely cites historic tales and folk myths, nuclear apocalypse, and medicinal powers, the Big Bang and “dark matter,” all of which serve in different ways to create structures of non-linear time and de-centered space.