Cai Guo-Qiang at Guggenheim Bilbao
Cai Guo-Qiang has undermined artistic conventions of our time, drawing, free-form, in ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial sightings, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, technology-related powder, Chinese medicine and modern global conflicts. Cai's art is a form of social energy in constant transformation, linking what he calls "the world of the visible and the invisible." This retrospective covers the full spectrum of art, multimedia and protein, creator of this concept in all its complexity.
Cai, born in the town Quanzou Chinese province of Fujian in 1957, studied art at the Shanghai Drama Institute. Highlighted in the eighties as a member of the group of Chinese artists who flourished during the experimental period after the Reformation. After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai was able to harness the productive seam of art and international thinking of the twentieth century. During this time, came to dominate the use of gunpowder to create fireworks with its characteristic design projects and the resulting explosion outdoor surrounding these drawings.
These practices incorporate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect the philosophy of Cai, for whom the conflict and the transformation are interrelated conditions of life and thus of art. Intuitive as well as analytical drawings with gunpowder explosion and projects are intrepid, conceptual, interactive and ephemeral, are made at specific sites and correspond to a fixed term, ie it is an art staged with a new array of cultural significance.
Cai lives in New York since 1995. As we had a growing visibility in the global art biennials, public celebrations and exhibitions in museums throughout the world, has expanded the scope of their artistic activities to include large-scale facilities. These installations, and sculptural allegorical, often recovering signs and symbols of Chinese culture and highlight the dialectic between local history and globalization. Recently, Cai social projects involving local communities in the creation of artistic events at remote sites which have no connection with art, such as military bunkers, and reveal the influence of the socialist utopia that is derived from the experience of having grown in China in the era of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
The exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the artist has designed a site-specific installation, sees art as a process that unfolds in time and space. The nature of the structure of art forms created by Cai is unstable and addresses ideas on the transformation, the cost of equipment and connectivity. Cai for any process of change, however violent it may be, is determined by its social ideal, as it seen as a seminal creation process positively. His expanded notion of cultural experience subverts clichés such as East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, center versus periphery, and thus suggests a new paradigm for the cultural arts and for this globalized age. Hence, Cai's accession to the phrase "I want to believe."
