New York Stories: Part I…

Cai Guo-Qiang is an artist from the Chinese province of Qaunzhou whose exhibition I Want To Believe is currently filling pretty much most of the Guggenheim in New York.

The Guggenheim, although nowhere near the size of New York’s vast Metropolitan Museum of Art or Museum of Modern Art, is still a pretty big place and for an artist who’s still alive to more or less have the run of the place is an impressive feat.

Cai is most famous for his gunpowder paintings, where he essentially lays down images of trees or other natural phenomena in gunpowder or with fuses, then places boards and rocks on top of then and lights the fuse. The gunpowder burns and explodes and any fires are put out leaving the burnt imprint scorched into the canvas.

It sounds mental but the images he creates are stunning and the exhibition features film of him at work with this team of assistants and the massive tree he created then lifted into place so it filled the whole wall of one gallery’s entrance hall was utterly stunning. You also imagine the act of creation and the event surrounding it is probably as important as the finished work of art itself.

It’s also quite clever. The Chinese created gunpowder, which is one of its greatest gifts to Western and other civilisations, but instead of using it for warfare Cai turns it from a destructive into a creative force. One gunpowder painting featuring the silhouette of a wolf in a bamboo forest was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Cai creates large-scale sculpture installations too and one featuring a pack of 99 running wolves charging into a perspex wall (a metaphor for will and energy and creative power crashing against a wall of ideological dogma) was incredible too.

Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, based on the cunning ruse off a Chinese general to rearm his archers and thus win the battle, is also an incredibly striking piece of work.

There were so many other stunning pieces in this exhibition that I could easily write for another two or three hours about his imagery and his use of Chinese religious and mythical imagery. In short it’s a truly stunning exhibition and I hope it comes to the UK.