For Chinese-born “artistic engineer” Cai Guo-Qiang, an unrealized vision does not beget remorse, self-pity or disappointment. There is no excuse to give up on a dream the first time around, especially when it’s not due to materials that fail to cooperate but rather to authorities’ reluctance to blow up national landmarks. From now until April 26th, the District’s own Hirshhorn Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is fortunate enough to host an exhibition featuring some of Cai’s most explosive flops.
Trained in Stage Design at the Shanghai Drama Institute, Cai’s expertise is in Chinese gunpowder, as used in roman candles, firecrackers, smoke bombs and any number of other incendiary devices. The only constant in Cai’s art seems to be his medium of choice: all things explosive. His projects also tend toward the grandiose. He has proposed constructing a mock ignitable “Chinese Tower” to be funded by the Cultural Ministry of China which was to match in height and stand adjacent to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. In 2003, he worked on a project to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the British Museum by draping 1000 meters of fuses in the pattern of a spider web across its east and west wings. The majority of these projects reached the final technical stages but were rejected because of either the host government’s unwillingness to litter its streets with ashes or waning enthusiasm as the costs skyrocketed.
A few of Cai’s more ambitious attempts have proven successful, most notably his self-explanatory “Project for [sic] Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters,” as part of his series, Projects for Extraterrestrials, which staged fireworks shows in countries all over the world, including Finland, Egypt, Japan, South Africa and the United States. Many of his works incorporate a liberal political message. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, he arranged a project entitled “Bigfoot’s Footprints,” in which soluble shells fitted with computer chips would be launched across the border between East and West Germany at dusk, like fiery footprints bridging the divide. Like so many of his other ideas, this too went unrealized.
The “Traveler” collection, which is staying in D.C. until April 24, is made up of two parts. The first portion, entitled “Unlucky Year: Unrealized Projects from 2003-2004,” resides in the Hirshhorn. Here one can view nine more reasonably proportioned works. Each piece is a draft of a plan that never saw the light of day; it’s the aftermath of a fireworks extravaganza in miniature. By painstakingly tracing shapes out of gunpowder onto his handmade hemp canvas, Cai manages to achieve in two dimensions what he couldn’t in three. A simple cigarette lighter provides the spark that radiates out and strategically singes the surface. The movement of the flames on the canvas is clearly defined by fine hair-like scars and the occasional pockmark where it has burned the whole way through. The colors, though all produced by the same substance, range from chalky saffron and cocoa to a rusty orange and a shimmering black that appears blue in just the right light; the spreading of ashes creates shadows where the image requires depth.
Perhaps the most remarkable recreations in this collection of Cai’s harebrained schemes is the striking “Birds in Flight.” The original involved attaching roman candles to the wings of a plane and adjusting them to resemble the flapping of wings. On canvas, a solitary white figure traces the path of a bird through clumps of combusted material.
“Reflection,” the sister exhibition to these blueprints, finds its home in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Cai chose to separate the two as a symbolic gesture, to represent the hard-to-define nature of his work as containing elements of both ancient Asian and modernist traditions. Crammed into an already tiny foyer, “Reflection” features a 50-foot salvaged Japanese boat hull, barnacle deposits and all, floating on a sea of porcelain idols in various states of disrepair. These figurines, rejected by a factory for being somehow flawed, depict the Buddhist goddess Guanyin, whom Cai worshipped as a child in rural China.
“Realized projects are like bright fireworks in the sky,” Cai said. “Unrealized projects are the dark nights. Both are parts of the artist’s work. But the dilemma is that when people look up at the sky, they want to see fire flowers, not darkness.”
