Controlled Spontaneity: Interview with Cai Guo-Qiang

Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang has been making his signature gunpowder works for over 20 years. In 2008, he was commissioned to create Footprints of History (2008), a dazzling firework arrangement that traversed the Beijing sky during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.  

Cai’s latest exhibition, “Falling Back to Earth,” which opened this past weekend at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), however, is sans fireworks. Viewers will witness the artist’s more reflective side, which curator Russell Storer attributes to Cai’s “increasing focus on the world we live in.”

Three huge works will take up QAGOMA’s entire ground floor—a first for the museum—including two new commissions, Heritage and Eucalyptus, along with Cai’s popular Head On (2006), which features 99 artificial wolves leaping across the gallery in a loop formation.

Heritage is a vast installation comprising 99 slightly larger-than-life sculpted animals drinking from a pool where the surface tension of the water is regularly disrupted by a single falling drop, while Eucalyptus is a gum tree that runs the length of the building like a relic from another time. Both works encourage the contemplation of Australia’s ecosystem.

On the eve of his arrival in Australia, Cai exchanged emails with ArtAsiaPacific about his vision for “Falling Back to Earth” and how a ten-day family trip to Queensland’s Lamington National Park and North Stradbroke Island with his wife and eight-year-old daughter in 2011 inspired the work’s conceptual framework.

When did you conceive of Heritage and Eucalyptus?

Heritage was slowly conceived after I returned to New York, but the concept was developed during my extended visit to Queensland. I was struck by the beautiful scenery, clean air and natural landscape, and I felt that this place was the last piece of pure and heavenly terrain on Earth. This thought alone illustrated that Earth as a collective whole faces a problem.

Eucalyptus provokes uncertainty and is more arbitrary. A gigantic tree transported to the museum and placed in the gallery as an artwork, leaves us the possibility of encountering the unexpected.

Is your work more emotionally or intellectually based?

On an emotional level, these two works respond to the natural, and thus the spiritual, environment. However, I also feel that on an intellectual level, they are not so simple and straightforward, especially when they serve as a form of artistic expression. Any human activity—whether it is building a home or creating an artwork—affects our environment and the natural world, and creates conflict to varying degrees. Although Heritage was inspired by the Queensland landscape, it touches on a broader theme that explores the natural world’s current state. Although visually, it may be easy to perceive the work as a poetic interpretation of a utopian vision, its concept is actually quite sad. The title Heritage gestures at this.

What is the role of spectacle in your art?

The spectacular nature of my works is related to my personal experiences. I grew up in a small town; as a young boy I often looked at the starry sky and pondered the vastness of the universe. Before leaving China, I travelled to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Dunhuang, where I experienced nature and learned about the long and rich history of the country. After I moved to Japan and ultimately to the United States, as a foreigner I had to speak louder in order to be heard in these different societies. In the small town I came from, to make things by blowing them up with gunpowder was a big enough gesture. Even though I was intentionally destroying my timid and cautious persona, I still needed courage to confront destiny. Perhaps it is because of this that I am skilled at creating and often make large-scale works.

Chance, serendipity, unpredictability and chaos don’t seem to have come into your latest works as much as they have previously. Can you comment on how significant the unpredictable is to you?

Unpredictability is very important to me. From the very beginning when I was looking to use gunpowder, I became aware of my tendency to be controlling. I am relatively timid, and I want to make things perfectly. Therefore I needed something that could not be controlled and was destructive, so I thought of using gunpowder. Gunpowder brought a stronger element of chance. Over time, I have slowly formed habits and a degree of control over the medium, so I often have to challenge it in new ways. In my gunpowder drawings, I slowly felt that the potential for expression in outdoor explosions was diminishing, so I allowed the medium to become pure painting.  Once my work enters the realm of painting, it faces comparisons to other painterly issues from the history of art. This adds a lot of difficulty, especially when I attempt and strive to use gunpowder to express the spiritual pursuit in literati ink painting. Therefore I have to address gunpowder as a free, independent life force, and must consider how I am bouncing off that force. At the same time, I have to allow the tension and wild nature of the medium itself to run free, so I am constantly trying to strike a balance between control and anti-control. This often puts me in a passive state, which is a good state.

Do you ever fear that aesthetics and concept will succumb to to spectacle?

I am concerned, and it is precisely this concern that makes me want to create such works. The two can get lost easily, and that excites me. For instance, when I was designing the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games there were tens of thousands of spectators present. These spectacles and performances can easily lose their status as art. The parties involved—from governments, to nations, to the International Olympic Committee, to the billions of viewers sitting in front of their televisions—each have something they want. I wonder: is there any room left for your work and you as an artist? This is indeed difficult and dangerous, but I always try my hardest and attempt to squeeze art into these larger events, whether it is the Footprints of History that stride across the night sky in Beijing, or letting lovers’ climaxes determine when to ignite the fireworks in One Night Stand (2013). I am worried, but I deliberately cross the line.

Cai Guo-Qiang’s Falling Back to Earth is on view at QAGOMA through May 11, 2014.

Michael Young is contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific.