ART CITIES:Maastricht- Cai Guo Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang has worked in multiple mediums within art, including drawing, installation, video and performance art. Drawing upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, these site-specific projects and events interpret and respond to local culture and history. His well-known gunpowder explosions surpass the two-dimensional and move freely from indoor spaces to the society and nature outside

By Efi Michalarou
Photo:Bonnefantenmuseum Archive

Cai Guo-Qiang received the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art for 2016. The Award is a tribute to a living non-Western artist with an exceptional oeuvre and a demonstrable influence on other artists, exhibition makers and art professionals. Bonnefantenmuseum is presenting “My Stories of Painting” the first solo exhibition of Cai Guo-Qiang in The Netherlands. This is the first exhibition that focuses on Cai’s long journey of painting in terms of two parallel paths. The first traces his decades of exploration in painting, presenting 100 works from different periods, of varying scale, and across various mediums, many of which are shown for the first time. The trajectory begins with his time in China: watercolours and oil paintings, assignments from his student days, experimental paintings, and oil paintings with gunpowder, followed by his time in Japan (1986-95): paintings created purely with gunpowder, and gunpowder drawings for explosion events. It then moves on to his time in New York: paintings reflecting his unique challenge to the issue of painting through his consistent artistic methodology, including recent pieces following his return to creating independent gunpowder paintings in the past few years. Evolving from black gunpowder to color gunpowder, this new stage registers the artist’s unrestrained pursuit of his childhood dream to become a painter, as well as his confrontation with the integral challenges of contemporary painting. The second path is that of his family: his grandmother, parents, wife, and daughters. Through their paintings, photography, and other works, be it professional or amateur, realist or amorphous, viewers can see how generation after generation, the artist’s family accompanies and mutually influences

Info: Bonnefantenmuseum, Avenue Ceramique 250, Maastricht, Duration: 30/9/16-1/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.bonnefanten.nl