Cai Guo-Qiang
"Cai Guo-Qiang" by Isa Tousignant, Winter 2006, pp. 78-79
The challenge of curating for the defunct aluminum factory that is the National Gallery of Canada’s immense Shawinigan Space lies in successfully inhabiting its grandeur. “Long Scroll,” the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s debut solo museum exhibition in Canada, features, among other things, ten full-scale cars and nine life-size tigers. Presence is not a problem.
Throughout his 20-year career, Cai has exhibited around the globe and defined himself as an artist who likes to see things go boom. One of his signature media is gunpowder, which he manipulates in myriad ways: sometimes he shoots it up into the sky, creating black-cloud constellations of surprising beauty; sometimes he lays it flat on rice paper and sets it on fire to create large-scale gunpowder drawings.
An introduction to the exhibition’s concept in the form of a scroll work by Cai’s own father, a painter, leads the visitor into the main space amid Inopportune: Stage One. Nine white cars lie lined up before us, the first and last with wheels firmly planted, the seven in the middle in various states of suspension high above our heads. Each car is speared by dozens of sequenced multi-channel light tubes for singular dramatic impact. The piece oozes narrative, with the whole accident scene unfolding in our minds. The dwarfing effect of the materials is only surpassed by the size of the idea: to represent artistically the flow of energy through action, to suspend in time a moment’s ch’i.
Inopportune: Stage Two echoes Stage One in its emphasis on linear perception: both works read like Chinese landscape paintings, from right to left. Stage Two consists of nine tigers made out of fibreglass and dyed cowhide, each placed in a different ferally defensive position, each heartbreakingly pierced by dozens of arrows. Cai celebrates contrasts here: between theatrics and realism, and between two kinds of heroism—that of the tigers, resisting death despite its omnipresence, and that of the unseen hunters, undoubtedly very proud of their assault. The scene has mythical proportions, and political ones too, since tiger-hunting is an illegal yet continuing practice.
Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki, featuring an ancient wooden boat found in Iwaki, Japan, filled to the gills with porcelain fragments, is perhaps the exhibition’s most beguiling work. The show’s only weakness rests in the works on paper, comprehension of which depends on two video demonstrations displaying their explosive beginnings. Without the “making of” background, these works would pale in comparison to the installations and hint at an unsavoury penchant for gimmickry.
The artist’s themes culminate in Illusion, a three channel video work presenting footage of a tenth car exploding with fireworks superimposed on a slow pan of Times Square in New York City. It’s a thrilling work, imbued with the fundamental excitement of destruction yet fraught with today’s political realities. As we watch a car drive slowly through America’s most visible intersection while undergoing a psychedelic rainbow-coloured explosion, not a soul bats an eyelash.
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