Word: cai
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...It’d be nice if there were fewer people so there’s less competition,” Sophie Cai ’11 says. “Everyone’s trying to get the best spots...
There's certainly a feeling of midcareer big bang in "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe," the clamorous retrospective that opened recently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In the 13 years since he relocated to New York, Cai has moved on to many other kinds of art, including dreamlike sculptures and big theatrical installations like Head On--dozens of papier-mch wolves galloping headlong into a glass wall. In the same period, he's also become a star on the global-exhibition circuit, a position the Guggenheim show certifies. The show also draws...
Born in Mao's China, Cai knows all about societies in transformation. He revisits Beijing often these days to help design the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. But an ambivalence about his burgeoning homeland courses through his art. On the one hand, there's his 1998 piece Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows--a wooden boat flying a Chinese flag and pierced by hundreds of arrows. It has its sources in the story of a 3rd century Chinese general who had to gather arrows before a battle and did it by surprising the enemy with a predawn flotilla manned...
...other hand, there's Rent Collection Courtyard. It's a replica of more than 100 life-size clay statues that were originally crafted in Shanghai in 1965 as pure Maoist agitprop, a tableau of peasants being abused by a greedy landlord and his thugs. In 1999 Cai had a team of artisans reproduce the ensemble for the Venice Biennale. Set in a new context, as they are again at the Guggenheim, the figures took on a new meaning. They became artifacts of a bygone communist order and the lost power of its coercive spectacles...
...record show that contemporary art has coercive spectacles of its own. One of them is Cai's Inopportune: Stage One--a car-bombing presented as a Chinese-scroll sequence of tumbling white automobiles, blinking light rods bursting from them like fireworks--suspended down the length of the Guggenheim's vast rotunda. Cai sees it as a "contradictory presentation--very strong physical violence presented in terms of physical beauty." And there's no denying that the piece brings its share of wow factor to the rotunda. But it's also an instance of an artist playing air guitar with history--making...