ART-PRESENTATION: Cai Guo-Qiang, Odyssey and Homecoming

Cai Guo-Qiang began to experiment with gunpowder in his hometown Quanzhou, and continued exploring its properties while living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, which led to the development of his signature outdoor explosion events. Drawing upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, his often site-specific artworks respond to culture and history and establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. His explosion art and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to engage with society and nature.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum of Art Pudong Archive

Cai Guo-Qiang’s solo exhibition “Odyssey and Homecoming” inaugurates the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai. Touring from the Palace Museum in Beijing where it opened last December, “Odyssey and Homecoming” features 119 of Cai’s signature gunpowder paintings and other works, including his widely acclaimed first-ever VR work “Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City”. The works in the exhibition represent Cai’s research, exploration, and voyage across the globe, recreating his “Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History” project for audiences in China.  The exhibition unfolds across two sections. “Odyssey” features artworks from his solo exhibitions in world-renowned museums, in which he engages with the essence of Western art and civilization embodied within those institutions. He dialogued with classical Greek and Roman art in Pompeii and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Italian Renaissance at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Spanish Golden Age and Baroque Art at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Russian Socialist Realism at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Modernism at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the early roots of Modern art in Cézanne’s hometown of Aix-en-Provence, in addition to ongoing trips to trace Medieval art history. The other half, “Homecoming” debuts new works that encompass aspects of traditional Chinese art and culture as well as the cosmos as his eternal homeland. This exhibition marks another important step in Cai’s homecoming to Shanghai, following his 2014 solo exhibition at the Power Station of Art. Cai first saw foreign painters’ original works in person decades ago in Shanghai, which also sowed the seeds for his “Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History”.   Visitors will see how the fusion of and dialogue between the past and present, East and West, can all coexist in an individual. Showing this may have some special significance in a world that is shadowed by the pandemic and currently deglobalizing to a state of mutual isolation. The exhibition poses the questions: Can different cultures reach mutual respect? Can great cultures specific to certain people become shared heritage for all humankind? Through his trademark artistic process, Cai intricately patterns gunpowder and explodes it on canvas: a fiery event that leaves painterly residues. Rather than division and isolation, the explosion as the paintbrush coalesce in Cai’s monumental works to advance cultural exchange and shared understanding beyond nationality. The artworks on view color a new global vision for the history of art and imbue painting with a reinvigorated capacity to engage with contemporary issues. As a special new commission for the exhibition, Cai created the site-specific, kinetic light installation “Encounter with the Unknown” which measures over 30 meters tall and with a floor area of 17 square meters. A spectacle inspired by the nature-based cosmology of the Mayan civilization, the work weaves together images from stories and myths of humans who “defied gravity” and “embraced the cosmos” forming a tapestry of cosmologies from different civilizations. The installation takes the form of hand-crafted Mexican castillo fireworks, combining a rustic structure with the technology of computer-operated “light drawings” to create a dynamic, multidimensional image filled with wonder. The exhibition also presents ten documentary videos directed by Shanshan Xia, featuring several major art museums worldwide, and the classic works and artists from various chapters of art history with whom Cai has dialogued. Among these videos is a new documentary short highlighting the Museum of Art Pudong project.

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Info: Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, No. 2777 Binjiang Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China, Duration: 8/7/21-7/3/2022, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Thu & Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri-sat 10:00-21:00, www.museumofartpd.org.cn