Which Artist Has Explored the Properties of Gun Powder as a Tool for Making Works of Art
As I walk through Manhattan's Due east Hamlet towards the studio of Cai Guo-Qiang, I pass brownstones, hair salons and some guys hanging around speaking Italian. The first sign that I might be nearing the studio is a mirror-box sitting on the sidewalk, underneath the window beds, that doesn't quite blend in. And so a red door, guarded past a piddling stone lion and the Chinese character for luck. I've come to the right spot.
I'g meeting Cai (pronounced "Tsai") for tiffin at his studio in New York, where the Chinese artist has been based for more than a decade, because I'm told this is where he e'er eats luncheon. He is looking relaxed, wearing a brown T-shirt and shut-cropped grayness hair, and greets me with a business firm handshake that hints at how much time this 59-year-old spends at the gym.
Although you wouldn't know information technology from the unmarked door, Cai is one of the near remarkable artists working today. He specialises in gunpowder, and creates firework art on an unparalleled scale — recall of a chain of explosions that extends the Great Wall of China by 10km, or a flock of black "birds" appearing in the desert in Doha.
In 2008 he launched the giant footsteps that marched over Beijing during the opening ceremony for the Olympics. More recently, he created a "Sky Ladder" that sent fiery rungs climbing half a kilometre into the clouds. Not all of these projects succeed ("Heaven Ladder", an obsessional quest that was the subject of a documentary moving-picture show last twelvemonth, took three attempts.) But they accept pushed an old medium in new directions — Cai even makes paintings with gunpowder, to explosive and ethereal upshot.
A sweet, oily odor is wafting across the role, so while Cai finishes a meeting, I wander over to the kitchen to see what'due south cooking. Ane of the cooks points out the solar day's dishes: pork ribs fabricated with Coca-Cola, steamed cod, water spinach with garlic, lily bulbs with celery and sausage, green beans and an unusual crêpe made from lotus root, which turns out to be a studio speciality.
My mouth waters every bit nosotros discuss the food and, equally if on cue, an banana appears to steer me into the chief gallery. The room is huge — big enough to concur a dozen of Cai's giant gunpowder works, which are resting on the flooring and leaning against the walls, some more than than seven metres long. At a distance the paintings announced every bit colourful, explosive blooms, and so that the bright room feels almost like a garden. In the centre, a table has been laid for two.
Cai wanders in and casually finds his sweater on a demote. Simply there's nada coincidental nigh our dining table: the food is laid out symmetrically in six dishes, with a bowl of soup at each identify, and an open bottle of wine waiting on the tabular array. As we sit, Cai asks one of his studio managers to accept a pic of us, and I feel as if I've stepped into a piece of performance art. He pours the vino and I start with the question that's been uppermost in my mind since I walked through the door into this Standard mandarin-speaking world. It feels like a Chinese cocoon, and so why is he based here in New York?
As we offset our soup, a broth flavoured with pork and squash, Cai recounts how he left Prc when he was 29, and moved to Japan. Information technology was 1986, a time when Mainland china's opening to the world after decades of cultural isolation led to a moving ridge of exploration. "At the time, everyone wanted to get abroad and study, and I did also. In the field I was in, contemporary fine art, the infinite for doing this in Prc was small," he says, speaking Mandarin with a slight Fujianese lilt.
After nearly a decade in Japan, where he scraped by in a rural fishing village doing paintings and installation pieces, he moved to New York. Cai chuckles as he points out that he now earns more than from flying into Japan to collect prizes such as the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, than he ever fabricated while living there.
Despite this cosmopolitan groundwork, Cai still picks upwardly his soup bowl and slurps from it directly, every bit is common in China. He points out that his studio is more than multicultural than it appears too, with people from all parts of China — mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan — too as Japan. "Considering through fine art, through people working together and building relationships and trust, people can overcome the problems of politics," he says, dishing some lily bulbs on to my plate. "Have some, these are practiced for girls, and adept for the skin," he says, a comment that in Communist china would be considered the marking of a gracious host.
That all sounds nice, I say, biting the lily bulbs, which turn out to be tasty tubers with a fleck of crunch — simply artists can't really avoid politics, can they?
"That'due south true, I tin can't avert politics either," he says. He recalls going dorsum to Communist china to assist with the 2008 Olympics. At the time my co-operation with the Chinese government was total of frustration, doubts, it was not like shooting fish in a barrel," he says. "Art should not exist a tool of politics, only sometimes art can help make the political climate more open and help social club go more free. In my ain art, I endeavour to use my personal voice and effort to enable some Chinese people to see the possibilities of another kind of Red china. A more open Red china."
To his critics, Cai has at times been an enabler of the Chinese regime, working with the government to blueprint fireworks non only for the Olympics simply for 2009'due south 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. But he beard at the fashion art has become so politicised for Chinese artists, and the way that western media tends to come across all Chinese art through a political lens. "I can come back and exercise things for China; that is not a problem, but I also take my ain viewpoint, my ain principles," he insists.
We talk virtually the 2008 Olympics, and how they had the effect of making the country more closed, rather than open. At the time I had been in Beijing to embrace the games, and I acquire that Cai's courtyard house at that place is in the same neighbourhood where I later lived. We reminisce virtually life in Beijing'due south one-time alleyways, known as hutongs.
I serve him some spare ribs, and inquire about his upcoming exhibition in Moscow, which is about the most political topic of all — the October Revolution. It'due south the centenary of the coup that gave nascency to the beginning socialist government in the earth. Every bit nosotros crumb on the spare ribs (always a fragile job when eating with chopsticks), Cai tells me he has merely received word that the authorities in Moscow have rejected his yard firework performance, titled "October", which was to accept taken place in Red Square and had been in planning for more than than a yr.
"Of course they wouldn't give a reason, they just say, 'Oh information technology might interfere with security for the helipad inside Kremlin, etc.' But this was all stuff that they would take known beforehand," Cai says. His solo exhibition at Moscow's Pushkin Museum, too called October, is yet going ahead, just the explosion upshot — a theatrical 3-human action work set to music that was to have included teardrops and a giant blood-red star — will not happen.
"They were always trying to decide, do nosotros commemorate the October Revolution, or practice nosotros non commemorate information technology? The choice they fabricated was not to commemorate it," he says. "If nosotros practise commemorate it, and then we have to discuss it, study it, talk most communism, talk almost the Communist party. It could easily tear apart their guild and bring nigh instability — in that manner it is quite similar to China."
The manner history falls victim to totalitarian regimes is something that Cai has experienced first-hand, and he tells me that as he prepares his exhibition, he has drawn from his ain by in the Cultural Revolution that ravaged China from 1966 to 1976. He has but returned from his hometown, Quanzhou, where he fabricated a rubbing of a giant face up of Mao Zedong that was carved into the mountain when he was a child. "At get-go I was very nervous [about this exhibition] but I've turned information technology into something that is really nearly my own destiny, my ain life," he says, dishing some cod on my plate. The theme of the exhibition is revolution, romance, ethics, people searching for a more perfect lodge, he explains — and also all the bug that came about as a result of that search.
He has started writing essays for the exhibition about his ain experiences during the Cultural Revolution, and he tells me how in third grade he led his classmates as they bullied their teacher and tried to bring her out for a public denunciation, known as a "struggle session". He recalls how cute she was, and how he lied about something she had said, equally he led the charge against her. "As I was writing information technology, I was very sad, I even cried," he says slowly, "Simply when I was little I was very revolutionary."
Sitting hither in New York, information technology seems easy to discuss these topics, I say, merely stories like these are still taboo in China. Even betwixt friends, the Cultural Revolution is nearly never discussed. "It's truthful, people have selective memory when it comes to these things. I'grand that mode also, then it is really through this Pushkin exhibition that I've written out the past, and faced upwards to it," he says.
He tells me how the schoolchildren tried to track their teacher down, but didn't observe her, and later smashed the windows in their school. "As I write these stories, I feel like these things bring out the suffering and uneasiness in my centre. They became scars. These times, the times that we grew up in . . . These things besides later influenced my art, and the mode I view lodge."
In that location's a silence and nosotros sip our wine. "Everything I'one thousand saying now is so heavy, isn't information technology?" he says.
I notice a small chantry mounted on the wall behind where Cai is sitting — an altar to Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy — and inquire him about his faith. He has sought out shamans all over the world, and the studio circuitous we are sitting in has been carefully laid out according to the principles of feng shui. "[It'southward] non like those religions where you accept to do this, and have to do that. But I believe that these unseen energies, these emotions, can speak to yous, tin can make you create art," he tells me, proverb he was raised in a organized religion that combined Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism.
The spiritual dimension is office of what has drawn him to gunpowder, the medium for which he is best known. Cai started experimenting with gunpowder in paintings in the 1980s, and later became known for his large-scale firework-based operation art. "For my art there is a common theme most of the time, it is using the things we can see, to search for the world nosotros cannot encounter," he says. "Gunpowder as a material can exist adept at showing these things."
We sample some of the lotus root pancake, and I notice that the dish beneath has an inky bottom, i of Cai's own designs. He describes what it is like to make i of his explosive paintings: layers of gunpowder are sprinkled over the sheet through stencils and fuses are taped on to create lines. Before ignition (which I'one thousand disappointed to learn takes identify in a special pyrotechnic lab on Long Island, and not in his studio) the sheet is smothered in cardboard that's been weighed down with bricks, to reduce the menstruum of oxygen and prevent it from catching fire.
"Before it explodes, you have admittedly no idea what it will look similar," he says. "It is like experiencing fate. You lot always think, 'Delight, give me a surprise!' " he adds, making the gesture of a prayer. "So sometimes, when I ignite it, I all of a sudden feel very reverent, like I'g not such a naughty child. In fact I often experience like an disobedient boy, just at the aforementioned time I feel like, all day, I'g a kid receiving God'south dear and care."
Many of his early gunpowder works were abstruse, black-and-white, their smoky textures combined with a sense of figure fatigued from his training in classical Chinese painting. Indeed, a painting in that manner leans against the wall backside him, although he tells me this is a recent work, made after the death of his father and his grandmother.
He has started using more colour, including coloured gunpowder, which he says is partly related to his grief. "With colour there tin can be more variation, more loneliness, more sadness . . . equally well as lust, desire, sex. The older I get, the more I engage with these emotions, with sensuality. Then what you can run into here all has sex every bit a theme," he says.
To our right, a giant colourful painting shows dozens of animals, which, on close inspection, are having sex in improbable inter-species combinations. His remark draws to heed his recent functioning piece in Paris chosen "One Night Stand" that involved 50 amorous couples and a lot of fireworks. (It also prompted public complaints for inciting public orgy.)
The cook arrives with dessert — a dish of fresh cherries — and black tea. Cai mentions that there volition be a pocket-sized seminar in the studio that afternoon about the abstract move, and invites me to sit down in. Fourth dimension has flown by and we oasis't even had a risk to talk about contemporary Chinese art nonetheless, I bespeak out. "Do we take to talk virtually that?" he laughs.
Suddenly his open up manner becomes more than guarded. "I have to be really conscientious when I talk about this," he says. Eventually, he says he finds a lot of contemporary Chinese art "very commercial", with too much focus on the tape auction prices. The topic clearly makes him uncomfortable. "Talking about China's issues, you accept to exist careful, if you lot say this and you say that, you tin be perceived as an outsider." I tin can't help but notice that for someone who is so dismissive of commercial art, he has had plenty of commercial success himself (and even, as our dishes indicated, his own line of tableware).
After a few more cherries, we caput downstairs for the seminar. 2 studio assistants lead a long word of the evolution of abstract fine art, and I start to feel a fleck like I'm back in art history class. Cai occasionally interjects with his own musings — why, he questions, did brainchild develop in the w before it did in China?
When I accept my leave, Cai nods to his assistant, who reappears with cards, books and a silver marking. As Cai starts to sign them, I realise that these are farewell gifts. In that location'southward a holograph postcard of the Sky Ladder, a scarf with an explosion blueprint, and his most recent book, into which he draws a deft figurine on the title page. Clearly he has washed this before. "Come up by any time for lunch," he tells me as nosotros shake hands good day. "Next fourth dimension our conversation will be a little lighter."
Leslie Hook is an FT correspondent in San Francisco
Analogy by James Ferguson
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/c141c5a2-891d-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7
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