CAI GUO-QIANG. Chronology
* This version of the chronology of the artist is based on the compilation of Sandhini Poddar originally for the catalog of the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, released by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2008. It has been extended and updated by Cai Studio in November 2014.
** The artist's words appear in italics, most of these declarations prior to 2007 are taken from the interview conducted by Alexandra Munroe, from Cai Studio in New York.
1967 Cai Guo-Qiang was born on December 8 in Quanzhou, located on the southeast coast of Fujian Province, China.
1971-1979 Cai's father, Cai Ruiqin, manages the publications produced by the local Xinhua Bookstore, and hence Cai has access to publications by foreign authors, otherwise reserved for government officials. Because of his passionate interests in history, calligraphy and painting, Cai Ruiqin is an important influence on his son and has a great deal to do with Cai's exposure to traditional Chinese art during these formative years. Furthermore, the family's relationship with local art and culture and with preeminent scholars widens the intellectual scope of Cai's early education.
My father likes to paint and had a remarkable influence on me. I remember most sitting on his lap as he painted landscapes on matchboxes. In retrospect, the small matchboxes may have influenced me more than his serious paintings did. A small space can easily be filled with the corners of the earth. Carefree painting truly depicts the workings of the heart.
When the Cultural Revolution first began, the People's Liberation Army carved Chairman Mao's portrait into the mountains. This is the earliest "Land art" I have ever seen. Now the portrait is no longer as distinguishable on the cliff as before.
1976 Mao Zedong (1893–1976) dies, and with his death comes the end of the Cultural Revolution and the start of the Economic Reform.
To us, Mao Zedong is the most influential person in the latter half of the twentieth century. He is the idol, God-like. His artistic talent, calligraphy, poetry, philosophy, essays, along with his military strategies and revolutionary campaigns deeply influenced my generation, despite the fact that later on we all started to question his ideologies. The initial and most direct influence of Mao's ideology on my generation was his views on the merits of revolution—"to revolt is justified." Anything that disrupts the usual and consensual rule or law is considered good. Maoist theories and his influence on society coincided with my formative years—elementary school and adolescence—and seeped into my mentality, consciously and unconsciously.
Throughout elementary and middle school, Cai actively participates in art and cultural propaganda troupes promoting Maoist ideology. He tries his hand at the violin, oil painting and theatrical performance. He also acts in martial art films in his late teens and early twenties.
Early on in the Cultural Revolution, people didn't go to school and participated in the Revolution instead. I learned propaganda art of the time. Xiaxiang (Down to the Countryside Movement) was a Maoist campaign that intended for intellectuals to go to the countryside and have their ideologies remolded, and to be involved in national affairs through physical labor. I avoided Xiaxiang and passed the exam to join the municipal propaganda troupe, which was basically a theater troupe.
Cai meets his future wife, Hong Hong Wu, who is a painter in Quanzhou.
My girlfriend painted with more courage and magnanimity than I did. While studying stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy, I grew my hair very long to pretend I was an angry youth.
Eager to broaden his horizons, Cai leaves Quanzhou to enter the Department of Stage Design at the Shanghai Theater Academy. He studies with the Department Chair, Zhou Benyi, who traveled to Russia to study realist painting and research stage design at the Repin Academy of Arts (also known as the Russian Academy of Arts). After the Economic Reform, Zhou went to America to research contemporary Western stage design. With a more comprehensive understanding of stage practices and a more heightened sense of spatial arrangements, interactivity and teamwork, Cai starts to deconstruct his traditional training, incorporating experimentation and spontaneity into a developing oeuvre.
Prior to graduating, Cai begins to think about going abroad. In the meantime, he is keen on finding his roots through travel, which motivates him to go on self-funded summer trips to Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang and the Buddhist cave sites in Luoyang and Dunhuang in China. He wants to use his time before leaving the country to experience the splendor of traditional Chinese culture and the power of nature. Unlike some of his avant-garde contemporaries, who are more interested in overthrowing tradition and subverting existing systems, Cai asserts his creativity using these foundations.
1980 Cai studies painting and stage design with Chen Yiting, who is a stage designer for the Quanzhou theater troupe and a friend of Cai's father. Designing and painting stage sets for the troupe provides Cai with a strong foundation for his installation techniques. He also studies drawing and sculpture with Yang Zhenrong outside of the theater troupe. He continues to debate with his father about issues in Chinese art and culture. He rejects the study of traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, and substitutes these with Western watercolor and drawing.
In my hometown, the mountain view is clear and the water is beautiful. I love the nature there. I always dream of returning to paint the landscape, but there is never a hometown that one can truly return to—because it can never stay the same.
1984 Cai begins experimenting with gunpowder, igniting it directly on canvas as a new artistic methodology. On one occasion, his grandmother uses burlap to smother one of his burning canvases, and serendipitously, Cai realizes that he should know not only how to light the fire but also how to put it out. This inspires Cai to use the same technique going forward. Gunpowder is a readily available material, and Cai has access to several domestic firecracker-manufacturing businesses owned by family acquaintances. Initially, the artist is unfamiliar with the chemical makeup of gunpowder and how to control the explosions, but he persists in experimenting, creating violent explosions. The results are often disastrous.
My fascination with this material comes from something fundamental and essential. I want to explore the relationship between the powers of destruction and creation. Artists have always been attracted to and in awe of unpredictability, spontaneity and uncontrollability. Sometimes these qualities can be social or conceptual. But sometimes they are very physical, biological and emotional. The act of making gunpowder drawings is connected to a twenty-something year interest in working two-dimensionally, and to my childhood dream of becoming a painter.
Cai moves to Tokyo in December and remains in Japan until 1995. He obtains a student visa and enters a language school, where he studies for two years, and occupies himself with a busy daily schedule. He brings a sizeable quantity of early gunpowder works with him. Rather than looking for a job, he focuses on mastering the Japanese language and creating art, making his early years in Japan financially unstable. He vividly remembers a beautifully painted landscape that he sold to a Tokyo classmate in the same dormitory for seventy U.S. dollars at the start of school.
While in China, I was not favored by either side. I was not interested in mainstream art, which used itself in the service of politics. I was also not a fervent participant in the avant-garde movement that rebelled against the system. Both groups were the same, demanding art be a tool for social reform. When you observe my move from Quanzhou to Shanghai, and to Japan, a commonality develops. These were places, relatively speaking, that emphasized formality and methodology, providing a source of individualism for me; they were places where I could do the things that pleased me and allowed me to indulge in my individuality.
Cai attends the University of Tsukuba for two years as a non-degree research student under the tutelage of Kawaguchi Tatsuo, a conceptual artist who participates in the controversial exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, in Paris that year. Cai serves as the experienced artist's production assistant and is deeply influenced by Kawaguchi's commitment to laborious creative processes.
Upon his arrival in Japan, Cai spends considerable time alone, reading and watching educational programs and science documentaries on television. He develops an interest in modern Western astrophysics. Publications by the scientist Stephen Hawking on cosmology and black holes are popular at this time, including the best-selling A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). The artist commences his iconic series Projects for Extraterrestrials, which aims at connecting the seen and unseen worlds, and bridging communications among man, nature and the cosmos. Cai also realizes his first large-scale explosion event, Human Abode: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 1, at the 89 Tama River Fussa Outdoor Art Exhibition in Fussa, a suburb of Tokyo.
At the moment of ignition, energy accumulates. There is a suspended instant before the full explosion. It is a very blank and quiet moment. After you light the gunpowder fuse, you see the flame burn into the core, and there is a moment of silence before a loud explosion. From this point of view, gunpowder drawings and outdoor explosions share this characteristic … Large-scale outdoor explosions connect the cosmos, nature, society, glory and heroic sensation, and this kind of allegorical excitement is incomparable. What the indoor works provide us with is a physical interaction, an intimacy and the complexity of delicate emotions in a serene atmosphere—which is very different from the outdoor works. I start pursuing art employing pure material and form after moving to Japan, and begin making gunpowder drawings on paper. This is a brief abstract phase.
Curator Gao Minglu organizes China/Avant-Garde at the National Art Museum of China, which offers an unprecedented survey exhibition of avant-garde art in China. During a visit to Beijing, Cai delivers a lecture on Japanese contemporary art for the exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts; he, however, declined to contribute a work to the exhibition. The Osaka Contemporary Center presents Cai's solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Works 1988/89, which includes the yurt used in the explosion event Human Abode: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 1 and early gunpowder paintings.
We didn't have money at the time, so we made the work Wailing Wall from melted car engines. After the exhibition, we melted the wall again and sold it to car companies to produce new engines. With little money, one can actually achieve a lot.
Cai travels to France to participate in Chine demain pour hier, curated by Chinese critic Fei Dawei, with his explosion event 45.5 Meteorite Craters Made by Humans on Their 45.5. Hundred Million Year Old Planet: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 3. This exhibition in Pourrières, Aix-en-Provence marks the first time Cai presents his work anywhere in the West. It is a turning point in the artist's career, bringing him to the attention of European critics and curators, and exposing him to the Western art establishment. Takagishi Michiko and Ito Shinobu of P3 art and environment, an alternative gallery in Tokyo, travel to Aix-en-Provence to witness Cai's project and lay the groundwork for a working relationship with the artist.
At that time the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun writes, "Fireworks at Mount SaintVictoire," introducing the artistic accomplishmentof Chinese artists and expressing concerns overJapanese art. This is the beginning of the "Chinafever" of the past two decades.
1991 Following his introduction to the West, Cai embarks on an ambitious series of seven gunpowder drawings, using paper mounted on wood as folding screens. These works are created with the enthusiastic support of P3 art and environment's director Serizawa Takashi and his staff for the installation Primeval Fireball: The Project for Projects, which is presented at the Tokyo gallery. This suite of drawings is a mature body of work that brings together drawing, gunpowder explosions and installation art, and it unfolds the prelude to Cai's tremendous body of works over a long period of time focused on the origins of the universe and extraterrestrial life.
When I was living in Japan, Japanese society was undergoing a period of self-reflection and self-examination. The Japanese wanted to become more international and modern; however, in the end, they only became more Westernized. The Japanese problem became my problem, which is how the series Projects for Extraterrestrials came about. I was thinking, "Would there be a way to go beyond the very narrow East and West comparison? Was there an even larger context or a broader approach?" This is the source of these concepts.
Tatsumi Masatoshi begins working with Cai and remains the Technical Director of Cai Studio to the present day. Cai is considered by the Asian Cultural Council in New York for a grant to go to the United States, but he is not selected at this time. The artist assists in the realization of Exceptional Passage: Chinese Avant-Garde Artists in Fukuoka in southern Japan, and realizes the explosion event Immensity of Heaven and Earth: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 11.
1992 Cai travels to Germany, where he realizes the explosion event Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9 in Hannover-Münden as a participant in the exhibition Encountering the Others: The Kassel International Art Exhibition. This is the first and only time that the artist places his body directly within the physical area of the explosion event. The realization of the event at a military base attests to the artist's interest in using site-specificity as political commentary early on in his career.
1993 The monumental explosion event Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10, commissionedby P3 art and environment, Tokyo, is realized inthe Gobi Desert in Jiayuguan, Gansu Province. Caimakes use of his considerable leadership skills toovercome significant bureaucratic and financialhurdles. To offset costs, for example, he works with a Japanese travel agency to organize a groupof Japanese tourists, who pay to attend the event and are mobilized, along with local volunteers, tohelp lay the fuse lines.
Cai receives a grant for an artist residency in Jouy-en-Josas, France at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. While there, he experiments with local herbs to make homemade perfume, mimicking the process of alchemy.
1993-1994 Critic Takami Akihiko, whose father works in Iwaki, introduces Cai to Fujita Chuhei, a local gallery owner. Cai relocates to Iwaki in Fukushima, located on the northeastern coast of Japan, and sets up a residence within the city's fishing community. He has chrysanthemums planted outside of his home, later using these flowers to make medicinal tea that is consumed as part of the interactive installation Chrysanthemum Tea. Cai recruits local volunteers to help him create an explosion event for his solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: From the Pan-Pacific at the Iwaki City Art Museum. Most of the volunteers, led by Shiga Tadashige, had never visited the museum, but they all provide much-needed support for the artist, who reciprocates by donating a large section of artworks exhibited in Cai Guo-Qiang: From the Pan-Pacific. Cai realizes the explosion event The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 (1994). He collaborates with the Iwaki residents, who switch off their lights so that the explosion in the ocean is more visible against the night sky. The artist's relationship with the residents of Iwaki, which continues to the present day, is an early example of his collaborative methodology, used to realize ambitious explosion events, installations and social projects.
I didn't have a very smooth start in Tokyo, and when I moved to Iwaki, Mao Zedong'smilitary strategy of "using the countryside to surround the city" proved to be effective. Mobilizing the local population, motivating critics, creating a point of discussion—these are very fundamental methods. Having a very positive attitude at the most difficult of times is also important.
1994
Cai creates Freedom for Mito Annual '94: Open system.
The visitors could pay ten U.S. dollars to free a bird. At the closing of the exhibition, there were about 100 birds left, and the museum set them free. However, before finally dispersing for good, these birds returned and lingered for a few weeks, because they were drawn to the food, water and air conditioning provided by the Contemporary Art Center. This exhibition, called Open System, illustrates the curator's hope that artists will not rely on the museum system. My work ended up creating a kind of irony.
Hasegawa Yuko curates Chaos: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo. The museum concurrently holds the exhibition The First Emperor of Ch'in and His Era, which includes a funerary statue collection of terracotta soldiers and horses. Cai digs a hole outside the exhibition gallery walls to create Grave Robbing, an installation that is made to resemble an excavation site. The project comments on how human history has been partially constructed based on excavated materials from burial sites.
Peaceful Earth was a project proposed for the United Nations in 1993. Amongst my many unrealized projects, I regret not realizing this project the most. At the turn of the century, I wanted people from around the world to switch off their lights for a few seconds, so the world could rest a little.
A headline in the year-end art review, published in The Daily Yomiuri newspaper on December 14, 1994, reads, "Cai Guo-Qiang—Very Active, Decline of Euro-American 'Contemporary' [Art]." The review is indicative of Cai's assimilation into the Japanese art world. He also becomes an important index for the growing awareness of Asian contemporary art.
1995 Cai realizes the explosion event Restrained Violence—Rainbow: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 25 at an operational power station in Johannesburg, South Africa. The explosion eventis a response to Nelson Mandela's slogan "violent resistance" during his period of undergroundactivity. It is the first time the artist dwells on the discussion of violence and society in his work.
Cai receives the Benesse Prize for the social project Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot from the Venice Biennale. This work is realized at the 46th Venice Biennale as part of the exhibition TransCulture, which is jointly organized by the Japan Foundation and the Fukutake Science and Culture Foundation. Cai is also the recipient of the Japan Cultural Design Prize, in recognition of his explosion events and artistic vision.
A grant from New York's Asian Cultural Council enables Cai to participate in a yearlong residency in New York as part of the P.S. 1 Studio Program.
In 1995 I participated in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo called Art in Japan Today 1985–1995. I had a large installation in that show, and after seeing my work, ACC approached me again. This time, they chose me; by then, I had represented Japan in several international art exhibitions, and the Japan Foundation agreed that I would represent Japan as an artist.
Cai arrives in New York in September, where he maintains a studio to the present day. At P.S. 1, he develops the prototype for the small-scale explosions used in The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century in 1996. Cai's move to the United States initiates an emphatic shift in his oeuvre, as he begins working more consistently with political themes and cultural subject matter.
This change can be partially attributed to contemporaneous discussions on China's international ascendancy and subsequent fears expressed by popular media in the West, as well as the artist's own concerns with the political climate in America.
1996 With the assistance of the Asian Cultural Council, Cai realizes The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century and has this series of small explosions documented in photographs. This project is realized in New York, as well as at symbolic nuclear test sites and Land art sites in Nevada and Utah. These explosion events are especially resonant given the artist's belief in the controversy of the sites and their symbolic value to the century.
Cai first realizes Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo,New York, in an exhibition that features the works of artists shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in1996. This installation is the formal introduction of his work to the mainstream art world in the UnitedStates. It also marks the beginning of a continuing relationship between the artist and the Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation.
On the occasion of The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the QueenslandArt Gallery in Brisbane, Cai proposes the explosion event Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Gloried or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 28. An accident at a local pyrotechnic company leavesthe project unrealized, succinctly conveying the instability governing several of Cai's projects.
We were installing gunpowder fuses in the plaza outside of the fireworks factory garage. Inside, people were deinstalling unexploded firework shells from the day before. Suddenly there was a bang, and everyone ran outside as fast as possible. The continuous waves of explosions propelled us forward. The picture shows the leftover fabric from the back of the curator's suit jacket. The heap of debris is the burnt camera of my videographer Araki Takahisa, which was collected when we later returned to the site. For the next exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama Origins and Myths of Fire: New Art from Japan, I originally planned to burn a fire engine. After the Brisbane accident, we gave up on this idea.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Flying Dragon in the Heavens at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark is the artist's first solo exhibition in a European museum. It is followed a few months later by Cai Guo-Qiang: Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, his first solo exhibition in an American museum. Cai initially wants to create an installation for the New York exhibition by cutting apart a United States torpedo boat. This project is unrealized, and instead he presents Cultural Melting Bath: Project for the 20th Century.
The Other Shore was a work created for the Istanbul Biennial. My curator friend, Rosa Martinez, said she only had 1,000 U.S. dollars for me to create a work. I said I didn't need that much, and that I would skip stones from the Asian side of the Istanbul Strait to the European side, then repeat the action from the European side. The footage was looped and presented as a single work, in which I looked as if I were skipping stones with myself.
Cai participates in the renowned traveling exhibition Cities on the Move, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. He also participates in the Venice Biennale again; this time turning San Jo Tower into a flying rocket.
1998-1999 I conceived of a project called Parting of the Sea: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 30, to be realized on the channel next to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. We did not anticipate that in the usually freezing cold month of January, the ice across the channel would thaw—it was a historical first. The gunpowder fuses were soaked in water and could not be ignited. Three days later, after working with the Nobel Company to develop a thoroughly waterproof fuse connection, we finally realized the project. But all the guests who came to attend the re-opening of the museum had already left.
Cai participates in the exhibition Aperto Over All curated by Harald Szeemann as part of the48th Venice Biennale. He is awarded the Golden Lion for his provocative installation Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard. This work sparks interest in Cai's use of the readymade and receives apositive response from international art circles. Simultaneously it raises issues of copyrightinfringement in China. The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing files charges against theartist, and the news stirs up sensitive political questions, but the case is ultimately dismissed bythe courts.
For the explosion event Firecrackers for the Opening of S.M.A.K., Cai explodes casino chipsover the facade of S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent. Cai and curatorJan Hoet, who invited him to create this work for the inauguration ceremony of S.M.A.K., began anongoing collaboration in 1995 that includes ten projects as of 2014. After hearing that Jan Hoetwanted a black cloud to be exploded in front of S.M.A.K., Cai ignited a cloud of smoke at themuseum as his final farewell to the curator.
Cai creates a number of works to celebrate the new millennium. One is an explosion event called Untitled (Last Supper) for the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands. Cai's idea is to distribute small gunpowder fuses to residents and have each household ignite these up their chimneys at dusk on the last day of 1999, before sitting down for a "last supper." Due to foggy conditions, the project was never fully realized; prevailing fog prevented a clear viewing of the gunpowder smoke rising from the chimneys.
In I Am the Y2K Bug, visitors in the gallery step on switches underneath a carpet that trigger mushroom clouds to form in the center of the gallery.
In 1999, Cai participates in a project created to help at-risk children in Bahia, Brazil. He designs a canon-making project for the children, using the method of "fighting evil with evil" to help children understand that human energy can not only damage but also build a society. Later on, the children were invited by the United Nations to perform in New York.
The counselors from the year after [2000] come back and tell Cai: "Those children that you taught all carry your picture with them."
2000 This is the first year in which Cai collaborates with Fireworks by Grucci, a pyrotechnics company headed by Phil Grucci and based in Brookhaven, New York. Together, they realize the explosion event Ascending a Staircase at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York as an homage to Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which was displayed at the Armory in 1913.
Cai's ongoing interest in the concept and practice of geomantic energy principles leads to the project How is Your Feng Shui? Year 2000 Project for Manhattan. For the project, the artist installs stone lions as feng shui remedies in the residential and office buildings of patrons visiting the 2000 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Feng shui often influences my installations. Even when the installation has nothing to do with feng shui, you can detect its governance in the way I place objects or how the elements in the work relate to one another. You can find it in the relationship these objects have with their surroundings, the attention to orientation, the treatment of the entrance space or the background, the creation of energy fields, and the relationship between the work and the audience or spectator. I consider the audience as part of the energy field, and mobilize and manage the flow of energy. I take all of these elements and relationships into consideration when creating works.
2001 Two years later, I went back to Venice again to participate in the Biennale, once more curated by Szeemann. I created "Szeemann's Water," which was sold in different galleries in the Biennale and titled the work Service for the Biennale! This is my second collaboration with Szeemann. After he passed away, a street in Italy was named after him, and I attended the inaugural ceremony. The street is only two meters wide and twenty meters long. Though small, it was quite moving. They gave it a proper metal street sign.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Impression Oil Drawings, at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, is the only exhibition of the artist's oil paintings in recent years. He depicts impressions and scenes from realized explosion events. A concurrent exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang: Performing Chinese Ink Painting is held at the Contemporary Gallery and Dr. Sun Yatsen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver. Just as he used readymade sculptures for his Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard, Cai often references art history and conventional art forms in his contemporary, conceptual performance projects.
At Sonsbeek 9 in 2001, Cai gathered local art lovers in Arnhem, Netherlands to paint landscape paintings as part of a performance titled Picturesque Painteresque.
Cai is commissioned to design the fireworks for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. For the occasion, he conceives of and orchestrate the first fireworks event in his career. Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Cityscape Fireworks is an approximately twenty minute long extravaganza of fireworks, realized along the Huangpu River in the heart of Shanghai. This occasion marks the first time the Chinese government invites a contemporary artist to participate in the planning of a state-organized event of such magnitude.
When a large-scale explosion happens, the impact at the moment of the explosion creates a sense of momentary chaos. It distorts time, space, one's sense of existence and of those around you. It has an impact both biologically and spiritually. It creates many possibilities, and somehow also pauses time. It is a flash-like moment that also creates a sense of eternity. Sometimes it makes time and space completely blank. It feels like time slows down.
Eleven firefighters from the firehouse next to Cai Guo-Qiang's apartment went for the rescue and did not return.
2002 Big White Truth: From Antonioni's Chung Kuo, 2002. One segment of Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo is screened under the sun, and another on a red projection screen. On the streets of Amsterdam, Cai saw this work in the window display of a gallery. He immediately identified it as Maksimov's work and began collecting. There are now about 260 works by Maksimov in his collection.
Cai's first solo exhibition in China is presented at the Shanghai Art Museum. As a show within a show, Cai curates the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang's Maksimov Collection to demonstrate the influence of the Russian painter Konstantin Maksimov on Chinese art. The exhibition consists of 230 works from Cai's own collection of paintings by Maksimov, who came to Beijing from 1955 to 1957 to teach oil painting and helped establish Soviet Socialist realism as the dominant academic style in China. Cai learned oil painting from the generation of artists who studied with Maksimov. This portion of the exhibition later traveled to Beijing and Shenzhen.
The solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Ethereal Flowers is held at the Galleria Civica di AarteContemporanea, Trento. Cai realizes Ethereal Flowers , a subtle, poetic explosion event set overthe local cemetery. The next day, while walking on the street, Cai is greeted by many locals. They tellhim, "My mother must have been very happy last night!”
2003 Jan and I have a very profound friendship. He deliberately campaigned to be elected as a legislator, so he could convert a casino into a contemporary art museum. I originally asked to use the money he allocated to my project to fuel the firecrackers I would ignite at the opening. Jan told me that the Ministry of Finance's response was that the act would cost him a life sentence, at the very least. In 2003, he was scheduled to retire, even though he had achieved the status of the sun in his country's culture. I exploded his portrait on the front wall in the museum lobby. I titled the work Inheritance, to test when the incoming director would paint over his portrait. In the end, Jan himself painted over the portrait before his departure to avoid troubling others. This year, he is going to leave his directorship at MARTA Herford in Germany and has invited me again to participate with a farewell souvenir project. This will be our ninth collaboration.
Cai is commissioned by the Siwa Project, Egypt, to organize a social project at the Siwa Oasis in the western Sahara. He collaborates with local children and families to produce Man, Eagle, and Eye in the Sky, an interactive, community-based project in which over 600 schoolchildren from forty schools throughout the governate of Marsha Matruh painted and flew kites. Following this project, a festival of kites has been held during the same time every year and has become a tradition of the region.
2004 Cai Guo-Qiang's aerial work, Painting Chinese Landscape Painting, includes six fighter jets thatpaint a landscape painting in the sky for the Miramar Air Show in San Diego, California. Usingthe blue sky as paper and white clouds spurtedby fighter jets as ink, two jets paint the mountainsand four paint the waterfalls and rivers. One ofthe pilots in the show dies in a fatal crash justminutes before the performance begins. The pieceis realized the next day, though overcast weatherpartially obscures the drawing.
In 2004, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14, my friends from Iwaki excavated a big boat as a present. The boat is exhibited at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. They crossed tens of thousands of miles, carrying along with them the romantic views and dreams that we shared in our youth. This act became part of the resulting artwork Reflection—A Gift from Iwaki, which has toured the world over the years. Since its creation, the artwork has been exhibited in Ottawa, New York, Bilbao, Taipei, Nice and
Copenhagen.
2005 The Ministry of Culture in China organizes the first official China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. Fan Di'an is appointed commissioner, and Cai curates the exhibition Virgin Garden: Emersion, further strengthening the artist's relationship with the Chinese art world and governmental cultural agencies.
Cai collaborates with Beijing's Long March Foundation to initiate the Yan'an Forum on Art Education. The forum is conceived of a place to discuss the sociological basis of contemporary Chinese art education based on Mao Zedong's legendary 1942 speech that was delivered in Yan'an.
2006 The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument at The MetropolitanMuseum of Art in New York is on view for six months, during which the explosion event Clear Sky Black Cloud takes place daily. In addition to this explosion, the exhibition includes three large-scaleinstallations.
Jennifer Wen Ma was a major contributor to Cai's artistic development. She is now an independent artist and was a core member of the creative team for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.
2007 There was no local pyrotechnics company, so the monks made their own fireworks. They were setting off bottle rockets. The bottle rocket exploded, and the launch failed.
Cai Guo-Qiang in February 2008 at the opening of his exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The three-month exhibition broke the museum's attendance record among visual art exhibitions.
In 2005, Cai submitted a proposal to bid for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. Beginning March 2006, he relocates to Beijing, shifting the center of his work and life. He is a member of the core creative team and Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Cai receives the Hiroshima Art Prize. To commemorate the prize, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art hosts a solo exhibition of his work. Twelve hundred custom-made black smoke shells are set off next to the A-Bomb Dome. In spells of deafening bursts, bouquets of jet-black flowers blossom across the blue sky, slowly dripping downward to form an immense black cloud against the sunny backdrop, as if grieving and praying for Hiroshima, and warning people of the anxiety and fear brought by developments in the new century.
2011 For his solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha,Cai explores the historical relationships between the Arab world and the Muslim descendents inhis hometown of Quanzhou, which was once the largest seaport in the world and the starting pointof the maritime Silk Road. Through the works, he attempts to offer a spiritual homecoming for theMuslim descendents who settled in Quanzhou overthe past millenium.
2012 Cai is awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for his achievements in painting by the Japanese imperial family. In December, Cai is honored with a Medal of the Arts from the US State Department, presented by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2010, Cai curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant da Vincis, which was exhibited in Shanghai during the World Expo. The exhibition featured the creations of peasant inventors in China, including artisanal aircrafts, submarines, and robots. By showcasing the peasants' courage and individual creativity, the exhibition explored their contributions to China's urbanization and modernity. Moreover, it manifested the hope of a people seeking a just and democratic society. The exhibition toured throughout Brazil in 2013, showing in Brasília, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and was the most visited contemporary art exhibition by a living artist that year.
Nuit Blanche is a contemporary art event organized by the City of Paris. Cai is commissioned to create One Night Stand: Explosion Event for Nuit Blanche, a conceptual pyrotechnic explosionevent on the evening of October 5. The happening
takes place on the river Seine between the Musée du Louvre and Musée d'Orsay. The artist employed fireworks to express lovemaking and its metaphorical eruptions; a sightseeing boat outfitted with fifty tents brings one hundred lovers from around the world to spend an enchanting evening on the Seine.