Cai Guo-Quiang: I Want to Believe. Do We Believe Him?
Reflexión-Un regalo de Iwaki, 2004. Caspar H. Schübbe Collection. Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2009. Foto: Erika Barahona-Ede. ©FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2009
Along with an Asian degree of exploitation of the commercial aspects of pop art by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, praised ad infinitum by the posse of characters populating the gossip magazines, the Guggenheim is presenting its first exhibition of an artist born in China. One feels like Bill Murray’s character in the film Lost in translation, on a gloomy Tuesday, in the tidal wave of lively OAPs and schoolchildren.
Cai Guo-Quiang (Quanzhou, 1957) presents forty pieces produced in the last twenty-five years: drawings, explosion projects, installations and social projects. Of these, the best known were his gunpowder drawings on fibrous paper, his open-air explosions, and, in his role as spectacle producer, the cauldron and opening and closing ceremonies for the last Olympic Games. The combination of traditional Chinese culture, Maoist revolutionary tactics in Japan –where he lived between 1986 and 1995–, Taoism, Buddhism, international art and terrorist violence, with Beuys’ social sculptures, UFO sightings, and a concern for “the community” which materialises in the artist’s request for extra hands for his work, are the raw materials with which he creates his play of creation and destruction.
The effect of lighting explosives on paper and the documentation of these Land Art interventions in the United States, where nuclear explosions took place, are combined in these retrospective exhibition with large-scale installations, accompanied by uninformative cards which speak about “Socialist idealism”, “cultural revolution”, and “the artistic conventions of our time”. In Head On, a pack of ninety-nine flying wolves leap and fall to the ground after crashing into a glass, in an allusion to the Berlin Wall and “human fallibility when professing a collective ideology”. Bilbao’s Rent Collection Courtyard is made up of life-size clay reproductions of all the characters at a feudal market; the pieces’ deterioration announces their end, as if they were peasants under the landowner’s yoke. The idea of the accident is conveyed by a shipwreck and its cargo of broken porcelains in A Gift from Iwaki.
In addition, there are two hanging installations. The eight neon cars which occupy the museum’s atrium (from the floor to the ceiling), simulating the effect of an explosion, and to emphasise the creation process which persists despite any sort of destructive act of violence (Really? And you come to Bilbao to talk about this?), achieve the decorative spectacular nature of a disco. And, when we come to the wood carvings of a crucified man and a court of musician angels in The Age of not Believing in God, we ask ourselves whether is refers to the show’s title or to the extraterrestrial sightings? Could Cai be a fallas artist in every sense of the word?
I do not know if this show is about what he did, what he suggests to the spectator, or both, but, as Chao Deng Ying, the wife of the former Chinese Primer Minister, Zhou En Lai, used to say: “If we want to fight against the Japanese, we will have to learn Japanese”.
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