Cai Guo-Qiang by ACC Art Books

contents

Opposite page: Cai Guo-Qiang, Pompeii amphitheatre, 21 February 2019, igniting Explosion Studio, 2019 (see Cat.12) Photo courtesy of the author

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DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD Xa Sturgis

INTRODUCTION Shelagh Vainker

PAINTING, GUNPOWDER AND BANANA SKINS David Elliott

CATALOGUE Shelagh Vainker

Part 1: Early Works in Gunpowder and Oil Cat. nos. 1-4

Part 2: Gunpowder on Paper Cat. nos. 5-7

Part 3: Gunpowder on Canvas Cat. nos. 8-10

Part 4: Gunpowder on Porcelain Cat. nos. 11-12

Part 5: Gunpowder on Silk Cat. no.13

Part 6: Gunpowder Explosions with Mixed Media Cat.no. 14

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

FURTHER READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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director’s foreword

ai Guo-Qiang (b.1957) is one of the world’s leading artists from China and the Ashmolean is honoured and delighted to hold this exhibition of his work. He is famous for his work with gunpowder explosions and fireworks, with which he has created spectacular displays in almost 30 countries, in the skies across Asia, Europe and America. Cai has exhibited works in the UK on several occasions, recently for the reopening in 2015 of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, but the present exhibition at the Ashmolean is the first to show his use of gunpowder with different materials. It approaches this through considering the different materials that he has used throughout his career, and the extent to which these relate to their uses in China’s past and in his home province of Fujian.

The exhibition does not only show the artist’s skills and innovation in using silk, porcelain and other materials together with gunpowder, but also how he adapts them to explore his own central concerns of creation, destruction, chance and the cosmos. Most works have been generously made available by Cai Guo-Qiang himself, and we are additionally grateful for loans from two private collections. It will also feature the single work by Cai Guo-Qiang in the Ashmolean’s own collection, bequeathed in 2013 by Michael Sullivan; the exhibition is displayed in the museum’s Khoan and Michael Sullivan Gallery for Chinese Painting. I especially thank the Denys Firth Family Foundation for their support. Xa Sturgis Director Ashmolean Museum

Opposite page: Gunpowder explosion on porcelain, 2019. Photo © Tobias Titz Photography, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria (see Cat.9)

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introduction | Cai Guo-Qiang in China

Shelagh Vainker

ai Guo-Qiang (b.1957, Fujian) is an artist who has performed and exhibited in more than 40 countries, living long-term in three of them, and whose multidimensional output is threaded through with the cosmos and the intangible. Whether he is addressing specifically the question of life beyond earth, as in his Extraterrestrials projects, or using the reaction of ignited gunpowder on paper to explore the creativity inherent in explosions, the concept of the universe as an unfathomable presence that contextualises humanity is always present in his work, alongside concepts of home and distance. The material with which he expresses these concepts is one that as an artist he has made his own: gunpowder. Through gunpowder Cai has engaged with the environment in large-scale projects and with history in site-specific ones. These and other imaginative handlings of gunpowder sit within his work alongside the material’s best-known manifestation – fireworks. He has depicted figurative images and human emotions with firework displays set against day and night skies, launched from buildings and rivers, and has also produced painterly designs on paper, canvas, silk, porcelain and, more recently, stone and glass. Cai is perhaps most widely recognised for the fireworks that played such a defining part in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games (Fig.1). The 2008 Olympic Games, the first to take place in China, were widely recognised as the most spectacular since their re-establishment in 1896. Staging them presented China, at that point one of the world’s most rapidly developing nations, with

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the opportunity to announce itself as exactly that, and also as a country opening up to the world. The chance was grasped decisively. As Director of Visual and Special Effects for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Cai Guo-Qiang was in a firmament of China’s most recognised art industry names, led by the film director Zhang Yimou as Chief Director. The 15,000 performers at the Opening Ceremony presented China’s long history and cultural achievements through dance and display before an immediate audience of 91,000; the global television audience was estimated at 1.5 billion. The more particular history defined by the spectacle was the progress of the People’s Republic of China from war-ravaged nascent state in 1949 to global powerhouse within 60 years – the cyclical unit of time in which China’s dynastic and agricultural calendars had been measured for more than two millennia. This state had been established for only eight years at the time of Cai Guo-Qiang’s birth, so his own growing up in China, until his departure in 1986 for Japan, was inextricably linked to its development.1 In 1949 the Communist Party, under the leadership of Chairman Mao, established the People’s Republic of China following twelve years of war with Japan and with the Chinese Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang government. For the first few years the new government’s priorities were to improve the lives of the largely rural population through land distribution, and to improve gender equality through legislation. These often painful reforms were implemented largely under military supervision, until an adequate number of state institutions had been

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Fig.1 Cai Guo-Qiang, Five Olympic Rings: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, 2008. Fireworks, commissioned by The International Olympic Committee and The Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (ephemeral). Realised in Beijing, 8 and 24 August 2008. Photo by Wang Xiaoxi, courtesy Cai Studio

established under the administration of civilian officials. In mid-1953 the leadership announced that the transition to socialism would begin; Soviet models were adopted in many aspects of public life, though often with adaptations for China’s own circumstances. In the economy this meant a shift away from small-scale manufacturing to the establishing of large factories and to modernised infrastructure, resulting in a greatly expanding urban population. In education, alongside the primary aims of increasing literacy and school enrolment, there was an emphasis on science and engineering rather than the humanities. For artists the transition principally meant the replacement of the centuries-old tradition of calligraphic ink landscape painting with training in the Western techniques of drawing and oil painting for the production of social realist images. Many of them were sent for training to the art academies of Moscow and Leningrad. Performing arts and popular entertainment were repurposed so that opera, film and storytelling promoted the new communist ideology. Aspects of performance that

played a part in popular religious practice, notably at festivals, were unaffected, however, as the informal, ‘superstitious’ nature of local cults meant that they were not subject to the state regulation of the officially recognised religions of Buddhism, Daoism, Islam and Christianity. In fact, local opera traditions continued in several regions. In 1956 Mao encouraged intellectuals, in particular writers and artists, to express themselves as individuals – a brief liberation that quickly ended with the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957–8. The campaign targeted officials as well as intellectuals, with large numbers demoted or detained and many more sent down to the countryside to ‘learn from the masses’. This continued through the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) – a campaign that aimed to increase industrial output and agricultural production at an unrealistic rate and in fact resulted in a famine that left tens of millions dead before eventually coming to an end in the early 1960s. The same period saw the collectivisation of labour and production, and the organisation of most of the population into people’s communes.

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In the early 1960s pragmatic economic policies were adopted to deal with the collapse in production of food and usable goods; these were against Mao’s wishes and against the background of a split with the Soviet Union that had taken place in 1960. In terms of art, this prompted the patriotic revival of landscape painting while in the economy it saw an increase in independent farming and small enterprises. These changes were overseen not by Mao but by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. However, Mao’s disapproval led to the widespread disciplining of party officials, an emphasis on revolutionary thought and the beginnings of a cult of Chairman Mao that resulted in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The Cultural Revolution was a period of chaos characterised by extremes of political violence and social breakdown. Children were set against parents, millions were incarcerated, institutions were closed and families divided, with members variously dispatched to prisons for reform, to faraway factories and mines to learn from workers or to the countryside to learn from rural life. Schools, colleges and other institutions for learning mostly remained closed until the mid-1970s. The arts, under the control of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, were reduced to ten model operas, four ballets, two symphonies and two piano pieces and, in the visual arts, to calligraphy for political notices and imagery in socialist style for propaganda posters. Following Mao’s death in 1976 and Jiang Qing’s arrest in 1978, a new era began. Known as ‘The Reform Era’ and presided over by Deng Xiaoping, the period is known for Deng’s pragmatic economic reforms and the opening up of China to the world, and many diplomatic ties that had been ruptured or suspended over previous decades were restored. In late 1979 posters with handwritten texts expressing wide-ranging views were pasted onto the outer walls of a bus station in central Beijing, which became known as ‘Democracy Wall’. Not far away, at the China National Gallery, a group of artists known as the ‘Stars Group’ hung their works on the gallery railings, both as an exhibition and as a protest at being denied other platforms. Books and ideas from outside China circulated freely, and a generation denied an education by the Cultural Revolution devoured them.

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The result, in art, was a momentum in creativity that culminated in the ‘China Avant Garde’ exhibition in 1985 in Beijing and a movement that has been called China’s New Wave. The developments were not confined to Beijing, but touched many of the art academies across China that had re-opened in the late 1970s, and provoked debate across the country. The discussions concerned not just art within China, but art in the rest of the world, and around this time some began to pursue careers outside. Among them was Cai Guo-Qiang. Alienated from classical Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and unconvinced by the frenzy for the West, he completed his studies at Shanghai Theatre Academy and left for Japan.

fujian When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, it brought together under a single government a country that had been at war with foreign powers and with itself for most of the 38 years since the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). The Communist Party governed from Beijing and its rules applied throughout China; indeed, the penetration of its policies to every town and village was key to the fulfilment of the Party’s political, economic and social ambitions. In various spheres and at various times it was remarkably effective. China is an enormous country, however, with centuries of customs and local conditions, geographical as well as cultural, that cannot quickly be made uniform. The resurgence of ‘feudal superstition’ in the form of temple restoration and pilgrimages, for example, was particularly prevalent in the early 1960s, following the great famine. Some areas seem to have maintained local customs more consistently, particularly those that were more remote, either from the capital or by virtue of their physical geography, or both. Cai Guo-Qiang’s native Fujian, the province of his birth and his family’s history, was one of these. Situated on China’s southeast coast, opposite the island of Taiwan to the east and separated from the rest of the mainland interior by an arc of mountains to the west, the region developed its own cultural traditions as far back as the Tang

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dynasty (618–906). Several hundred years before then, even, this physical separation had made the area both a secluded place of multiple ethnicities and languages and at the same time a destination for metropolitan figures fleeing political upheavals in China’s centres of power. This happened in the third century ad, in the Tang and Song dynasties and in the Ming/Qing transition during the seventeenth century. Its coastal position has equally had an effect on the area’s population and outside connections. From around ad 1000 to the 1300s, Cai Guo-Qiang’s native city of Quanzhou (Fig.2) was the biggest port in East Asia, with significant Hindu, Muslim, Nestorian, Manichaean and Christian populations. Cargoes included ceramics and many types of textiles from China’s interior, as well as tea and porcelain from the Fujian region. It is regarded as the eastern end of the Maritime Silk Route, connected to hundreds of ports and involved in shipping goods to destinations ultimately as far as Madras, Siraf, Muscat and Zanzibar. Visitors included the great traveller and writer Ibn Battuta (1304–77), and it provides the Zaytun of Marco Polo’s accounts.2 During the thirteenth century Quanzhou was where the Song imperial clansmen lived, following the invasion of the dynasty’s northern territories by the Jin Tartars and Yuan Mongols.3 The province also had a substantial population of educated gentry who engaged not only in the time-honoured pursuits of poetry and painting, but also in the more recently fashionable practice of tea ceremonies and competitions. In fact Fujian, with much of its hilly landscape given to the cultivation of tea and the production of ceramic tea bowls, was a place of urban sophistication as much as of thriving local religion. In the Ming dynasty Quanzhou was the port of departure for the famous exploratory voyages of the general Zheng He (1371–1433), though its role as China’s main trading port had by then declined. In the Qing dynasty the city held large numbers of Western residents, including traders and missionaries. Though Quanzhou’s Song-Yuan economic peak was never regained, and Fujian as a region was displaced by Guangdong as a trading centre, many local customs established during the Song continued right through to the twentieth century, even reappearing after the Cultural Revolution.

Chief among these are theatre and puppetry, rooted in religious practices that also continued, more or less, throughout the centuries.4 Puppetry’s dual origins lie in the Han dynasty, in the form of rituals intended to exorcise demons from the dead and in performances for entertainment, particularly at the imperial court. There were various types of puppetry across the country, with central north China, Sichuan province in the west and the city of Hangzhou in the east all active centres, but Fujian became particularly associated with marionette puppets. The beginnings of theatrical drama during the Yuan dynasty prompted a general demise in puppet performance, yet the practice continued as an element of religious performances.

Fig.2 Cai Guo-Qiang, Quanzhou, c.1983–5. Photo courtesy Cai Studio

The local cultures of Fujian that flourished alongside the metropolitan and cosmopolitan settlements and arrivals were themselves diverse, featuring many local languages, variations of Buddhism and popular religions and entertainments. One popular religion that is particularly relevant to Quanzhou is the worship of Mazu, the Sea Goddess. The cult’s origins lie in the Northern Song dynasty during the rule of its last emperor, Huizong, in the eleventh century, and the goddess was quickly taken up by the port city as a protecting spirit.5 As in other parts of China, New Year festivities involved setting off firecrackers, and this similarly took place in Fujian, where New Year worship for the kitchen gods involved lighting them after each ritual food offering. However, in another ritual – the incense-fire ceremony, which could last for two days – firecrackers were set off during the procession to an ancestral home selected

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part 3

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connections between man, nature and the spaces beyond earth increased. For example, Human Abode: Project for Extraterrestrials No.1 (1989) was his first outdoor explosion event. Now the series numbers over 30 projects – not all realised, but all of which look towards outer space and the universe as well as towards earth.

ai Guo-Qiang’s first use of gunpowder to create images took place in the mid-1980s, when he combined it with oil, on canvas. His first works using gunpowder alone, without oil paints, were also on canvas. While Cai developed this medium over the following decade or so, the main focus of his artistic output was in fact moving towards gunpowder explosion events as his interest in the

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In Japan in the late 1980s Cai had purposefully excluded coloured gunpowders, though these were available. It was only after the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games that he ‘returned to earth’, as he put it, with explosion events ‘that use the sky as my canvas and poetically unfold between heaven and earth’. 1 This shift in medium coincided with the artist’s growing preoccupation with earthly concerns – family, ageing, personal roots – and looking up to the stars rather than gazing down on humanity from above. It was in 2015 that Cai started applying more coloured gunpowder to canvas, which also marked a further development in using the medium to create figural images.

Fig.24 (inset) Cai Guo-Qiang sketching in Toledo (Spain), following in El Greco’s footsteps, 2009. Photo by Wen-You Cai, courtesy Cai Studio Fig.25 Cai Guo-Qiang, Day and Night in Toledo, 2017. Gunpowder on canvas, 260 x 600 cm. Photo by Yvonne Zhao courtesy Cai Studio

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Cai Guo-Qiang uses a variety of techniques and methods to create a gunpowder painting, depending on the effects he is hoping to achieve. A typical process might begin with him sprinkling gunpowder in varying types and particle sizes to create the composition on the canvas; gunpowder fuses are then placed at the edges of the canvas. With large works, several canvases are placed edge to edge; the whole is then covered with cardboard, held in place with weights, before the ignition sticks are lit. On explosion, a brief flash of fire occurs, after which smoke pours from beneath the cardboard. Figural images could be achieved through stencils. To create a stencil, Cai might draw the desired images on a large sheet of taped chipboard for his assistants to cut, and the drawing might involve a brush on the end of a long handle. The sharpness – or not – of the images depends on the nature of the explosion itself. Though this can be controlled to some extent – for example through the selection of gunpowder, how it is placed, the amount used,

the cut of the stencils or the weights holding the canvas in place – the element of unpredictability always remains. The project in which Cai Guo-Qiang developed his painterly use of gunpowder was the 2017 exhibition in Madrid, The Spirit of Painting: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Prado. 2 Founded in 1819, the Museo del Prado houses the paintings of the Spanish Royal Collection; it has a long history of artists studying and engaging with its collections. For Cai Guo-Qiang, his own exhibition provided the opportunity to develop his familiarity with, and understanding of, European painting, and in particular to consider in greater depth El Greco, the European artist who had fascinated him for longer than any other. Cai concluded that, in European painting, ‘the freedom and naturalness’ of painting in Spain from the seventeenth century onwards expresses a spirit with a ‘distinctly sensual and down-to-earth magnanimity’, likened by him to ‘the thrill of the “ignite, explode and extinguish” that accompanies painting with fire’. 3 The main work in the exhibition was a canvas 300 cm in height by 1800 cm in length. Created at an event the evening before the opening, it included motifs taken from paintings in the Prado collection. This concept was developed further in 2018 in Florence, with an explosion event that ‘painted’ flowers in the sky over the city, and the exhibition Flora Commedia: Cai Guo-Qiang agli Uffizi, in which the gunpowder canvases included many flowers inspired by the gallery’s Renaissance paintings and Boboli Gardens and a recreation of Botticelli’s Venus.4 The use of gunpowder to create painterly images – moreover images from visible, earthly, nature rather than cosmic relativity – is at the foreground of Cai Guo-Qiang’s current concerns as he continues to extend the limits of the material.

Notes 1 Museo Nacional del Prado, ed., The Spirit of Painting: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Prado. Madrid, 2017, p.78. 2 The Spirit of Painting: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Prado. Madrid, 2017. 3 Ibid. 4 https://www.uffizi.it/en/ events/city-of-flowers-inthe-sky and Uffizi Gallery, ed., Flora Commedia: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Uffizi. Florence, 2018.

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cat. 6 In Search of El Greco No.8

2016 Gunpowder on canvas 91.5 x 91.5 cm Private Collection

This canvas is one of a series of tests Cai GuoQiang produced ahead of his 2017 exhibition at the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In these he sought to explore the possibilities of blue coloured gunpowder by mixing it with varying amounts of black gunpowder in different ways.1 The exhibition was the first to present Cai’s new, more painterly use of the medium and his preparation involved many smaller experiments with black and coloured gunpowders. This intense blue piece appears also to experiment with the production of shape as well as colour. It is reproduced in areas of the large painting Day and Night in Toledo, 2017 (Fig.25), alongside which the work was exhibited. The extension of the colour beyond the immediate area of the explosion results from the coloured smoke that followed. The exhibition content incorporated several themes, all executed in gunpowder on canvas. Most related to historical Spanish painting and to Cai’s own history, while the room devoted to El Greco (1541–1614) represented both. In Cai GuoQiang’s first encounters with Western art, through books that he saw in his youth, it was El Greco who most captivated him. Cai has compared El Greco’s interest in spirituality and exaggerated forms at a time of representational precision in art to his own

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pursuit of individuality during the influx of science and philosophy that occurred in China during the early 1980s. As he has written: ‘I came to discover that El Greco has been a mirror in which I can see myself. His pursuit of intangible and mythical worlds, his stubborn love for the culture of his homeland and his outsider and nomadic spirit all resonate with me’.2 In 2009, having finished his long project for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Cai made a journey in El Greco’s footsteps. He travelled from the artist’s birthplace in Crete through Italy to Spain, finally arriving at Toledo where El Greco lived for 38 years until his death in 1614.3 Cai Guo-Qiang’s vast gunpowder view of Toledo at the Prado was accompanied by his own version of the earlier artist’s work El Salvador (The Saviour), 1608–14, from the Prado collection: a series of explosions, each onto two canvases, providing mirror images, based on El Greco’s Apostolado (Apostles, 1610–14) in Toledo; and the series In Search of El Greco, to which the present piece belongs. In short, Cai Guo-Qiang used the affinity he felt with the Greek painter as both subject and inspiration for his first explorations in painting with gunpowder.

1 Museo Nacional del Prado, ed., The Spirit of Painting: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Prado. Madrid, 2017, pp.90–3. 2 The Spirit of Painting, 2017, p.64. 3 Cai Guo-Qiang, ‘El Greco and I’, in Jeffrey Deitch and Rebecca Morse, eds, Cai Guo-Qiang: Ladder to the Sky. Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Munich; London, 2012, pp.172–3.

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acknowledgments 6

I wish firstly to thank Cai Guo-Qiang for providing the opportunity for the Ashmolean to present his work, and for his support throughout the project. Cai Studio has been tirelessly helpful and I wish to express my particular thanks to Sang Luo. Within the Ashmolean I am grateful to the Director Dr Alexander Sturgis for supporting the exhibition and to Agnes Valencak, Head of Exhibitions; Aisha Burtenshaw, Registrar, and Declan McCarthy, Head of Publications and their teams for their continuous advice, encouragement and efficiency, as well as Felicitas von Droste zu Hulshoff for developing the exhibition programming. Finally I would like to thank David Elliott for his contribution both to catalogue and to the exhibition concept, and David Abbott Fisher and Sarah Wheatland Fisher for their research support.

CAI STUDIO: Project Director Sang Luo Studio Manager Lulu Zhang Project Team Siqiao Lu Cai Canhuang Rui Tang Mengjia Zhao Registrar Silin Chow Archives Lydia Ohl Yvonne Zhao Frannie Trempe Hsiu-man Lin

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Technical Team Tatsumi Masatoshi Yi-Boe Huynh Financial Manager Hong Hong Wu Assistant Coordinator Zhenhuan Zhou Xiaohong Zhou Intern Mei Liu Zijun Wen Cai Studio Editorial Team: Sang Luo, Yvonne Zhao, Rui Tang, Mei Liu, Frannie Trempe

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