TOMB RAIDERS
Cai Guo-Qiang’s radical art is set against ancient artefacts to striking effect, writes Darryn King.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s radical art is set against ancient artefacts to striking effect.
The studio of the Chinese-born, New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang, in New York’s Lower East Side, exudes calmness and quietude. Natural light streams in via the pebble-floored open-air courtyard, and there’s a traditional Japanese tearoom on the lower level, with tatami mat floors and a bamboo reed ceiling.
Cai’s art, however, is anything but quiet. He has become particularly well known – in part thanks to the documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo- Qiang (2016) – for what are known as ‘explosion events’, as well as other forms of pyrotechnic and pyromantic expression, including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
When I meet Cai on a freezing winter’s day in the city, he has recently returned from staging an event in Pompeii, a city that knows a thing or two about explosive events.
But closer to home, though, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) is currently presenting Cai Guo- Qiang: The Transient Landscape, in tandem with Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality, an exhibition which includes eight terracotta warriors and a range of ancient Chinese relics.
Cai, who was born in 1957, was a teenager when the Ghost Army – the estimated 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang since the second century BCE – was unearthed by farmers near China’s Shaanxi Province in 1974. “It felt like a miracle,” he recalls.
The two NGV exhibitions will be a striking collision of the ancient and the contemporary, of art and artefact.
Hovering over the stonily rigid warriors will be Cai’s murmuration of 10,000 porcelain and soot-dusted starlings,
their formation subtly suggesting the shape of Mount Li in Shaanxi. “I imagine the 10,000 birds to be their ghosts,” says Cai, “the shadow of an empire.”
Nearby, an entire room will be devoted to a contemplation of the peony, a floral symbol of China: an elaborately sculpted porcelain peony garden encircled by one of Cai’s trademark gunpowder paintings – the charred residue of ignited gunpowder, set off in the safety of a studio, depicting the peony life cycle across 11 sheets of silk.
Two further gunpowder paintings, on Japanese hemp paper, depict a thriving cypress tree and China’s majestic Central Plain. Cai observed both on a research trip to Shaanxi in 2018, during his search for a “unique point to make”.
The result, he says, is a kind of “hallucination of the Asian Empire”– Emperor Qin’s monumental bid for immortality, contrasted with Cai’s more ethereal display of the “fragility of culture”.
“They are engaging in dialogue, but also rejecting each other,” he explains. The international demand for Cai’s work is such that he travels constantly. Recently, he has been engaged in an overarching project he is calling an ‘Individual’s Journey through Western Art History’. As part of the project, he has already created work in dialogue with Russian avant-garde artworks in Moscow and with Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece Primavera, in Florence. Future works will see him engaging with works from the Middle Ages, Impressionism and modern art.
But engaging in a dialogue with the terracotta warriors has provided an interesting Eastern interlude to that project. “The special thing about this exhibition is that it made me look back at the Eastern art aesthetic,” he says.
It’s also a far cry from Cai’s first visit to Australia in 1996, which was spectacular for all the wrong reasons. A planned explosion event on Brisbane River was cancelled after a storage room caught fire and dozens of fireworks were set off in broad daylight, forcing Cai and the crew to run for their lives. In around 30 years of experimenting with volatile materials it was his biggest art-related mishap. “It was beautiful,” Cai says, “but terrifying.” Cai Guo- Qiang: The Transient Landscape in parallel with Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality is on at the NGV until October 13. Go to www.ngv.vic.gov.au.