"Alchemy Pop"
The press on Cai Guo-Qiang’s
installation "Head On" at the Deutsche Guggenheim
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Wolves surge through the exhibition space, headed for a glass wall; a
video screen shows a house exploding in colorful cascades of fireworks; on
a huge gunpowder drawing, the silhouette of a pack of wolves traces a
gigantic spiral. Cai Guo-Qiang’s Head On, commissioned for Deutsche Bank,
was conceived especially for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. In his
three-part installation, the Chinese art star reflects on the history and
present of the German capital. Journalists’ reactions to Cai’s work have
been ambivalent – while they seem fascinated by the work’s aesthetic, its
symbolic content nonetheless remains somewhat of a mystery.
Cai
Guo-Qiang, Making of Vortex, 2006,
Photo:
© Hiro Ihara, Courtesy of Cai Studio
Prior
to the show, the expectations for Head
On ran high. After all, Cai
Guo-Qiang is an established name in the international art
establishment and "highly popular in the carnival of biennials," as Harald
Fricke put it in his preview of the exhibition in the taz. Together
with a number of selected colleagues from Germany, he was invited to
experience the making of a gunpowder drawing in the artist’s studio
outside New York City. Cai’s "alchemy Pop," however, reminded Fricke of
"sulfurous, expressionist graffiti," while his fireworks and fabulous
creatures – "a mixture between New-Age ambience and higher spirituality" –
came across like "local customs on a globalized level." Yet despite this,
Cai’s "tribute to his homeland is more than just a coy stylization,"
because the work also reflects the abrupt transitions in the biography of
an artist who left his native China only to "watch the massacre
on Tiananmen Square
on TV during a travel grant to Japan. … Revolting against the system is
another way of remaining true to one’s cultural roots." Yet in an
exhibition review two months later, Fricke complains of the "conceptual
deficit" of the installation at the Deutsche
Guggenheim. To his mind, the symbolism of the wolves and the glass
wall, the references to the exhibition location remain "puzzling". "In his
involvement with Berlin’s past, Cai apparently never progressed beyond a
few vague associations."
"Is this art, or is it mere craft?"
asks Elke Buhr from the Frankfurter Rundschau in reference to Cai’s
fireworks and gunpowder drawings. Yet she’s enthusiastic about the "subtle
nuances of an image" that, while it "arose in a matter of seconds, looks
as though it had a patina of centuries."
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Buhr concludes that Cai "simultaneously caters to and
reflects the expectations of a western audience" when he "approaches
Chinese themes with the means of the western avant-garde. … In this way,
Cai Guo-Qiang’s art is like a fortune cookie from a local Chinese
restaurant: a taste of Chinese wisdom, packaged sweetly."
Hans-Joachim
Müller’s article in the Zeit also expresses an
ambivalent attitude towards Cai’s works. To his mind, the freshly made
gunpowder drawing seems as though "a spray of meteors had just sped by and
its glowing white tail had grazed the image for a fraction of a second."
And while it "looks nice, … what else should one say?" But Müller doesn’t
want to reduce Cai to his "spectacular fire swallowing" alone. "It’s one
thing that he’s created ingenious inventions in the area of temporary sky
painting. But the other is a multi-faceted work that uses understandable
symbols and powerful signs to report on the friction Cai Guo-Qiang’s
generation has experienced as their country encounters world culture."
Cai
Guo-Qiang, Construction of Head On, 2006,
Photo:
© Hiro Ihara, Courtesy of Cai Studio
On
the other hand, for Gabriele Walde of the Berliner Morgenpost, Cai
is an "artist shaman" in the tradition of Joseph
Beuys. He reminds her of a "player with myths", who "joins together
various worlds with apparent ease" like a "Chinese bag of novelties in
global currency." "The fact that the Chinese artist studied stage design
can be seen in the way his large-scale installations in several, precisely
arranged parts occupy space." For Walde, Cai’s video work evokes "images
of destruction and of war (…) but more than this. The uneasy viewer
registers an almost childlike fascination for the beauty of fire." Eva
Karcher of Vogue also finds Cai’s work to be "explosive and
beautiful" – a "pyromaniacal ceremony" and "flaming meditation on beauty
and transitoriness."
Nicola Kuhn of the Tagesspiegel is
also fascinated by the "pictures of beauty and destruction – an elegy of
sparks and falling stars in Berlin’s evening sky. It only takes a few
seconds to associate this with the Second World War. (…) Breathlessly, the
viewer watches a work of destruction that is rich in association." To her,
Cai seems like a magician whose work "has its roots in Chinese tradition
and is merely crossed with western conceptual ideas." In the process, he
transforms the Deutsche Guggenheim into "a place of magic. And then you
suddenly believe you’ve felt a draft, a stream of energy that courses
throughout the entire exhibition space."
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