Cai Guo-Qiang
| Cai Guo-Qiang | |
|---|---|
Cai in October 2010
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| Born |
December 8, 1957 Quanzhou, Fujian, China |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Education | Shanghai Theatre Academy |
| Movement | Contemporary art |
| Awards |
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| Website | www |
| Cai Guo-Qiang | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 蔡國強 | ||||||||||||
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| Simplified Chinese | 蔡国强 | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Cài Gúoqiáng |
| Wade–Giles | Ts'ai4 Kuo2ch'iang2 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Chhòa Kok-kiông |
Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese: 蔡国强; born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. His father, Cai Ruiqin, was a calligrapher and traditional painter who worked in a bookstore. As a result, Cai Guo-Qiang was exposed early on to Western literature as well as traditional Chinese art forms.
As an adolescent and teenager, Cai witnessed the social effects of the Cultural Revolution first-hand, personally participating in demonstrations and parades himself. He grew up in a setting where explosions were common, whether they were the result of cannon blasts or celebratory fireworks. He also “saw gunpowder used in both good ways and bad, in destruction and reconstruction”. It seems that Cai has channeled his experiences and memories through his numerous gunpowder drawings and explosion events.
In his late teens and early twenties, Cai Guo-Qiang acted in two martial art films, The Spring and Fall of a Small Town and Real Kung Fu of Shaolin. Later intrigued by the modernity of Western art forms such as oil painting, he studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy from 1981 to 1985. The experience allowed him a more comprehensive understanding of stage practices and a much-heightened sense for theater, spatial arrangements, interactivity, and teamwork.
Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing." Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment." Cai’s importance when considered on the parallel history of Chinese contemporary art is "critical," as he was among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art, however geographically dispersed, as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.
Cai's work, inspired by an interest in traditional Chinese culture and the everyday aspects that defined it, is scholarly and at times politically charged. As a student, Cai made works consisting of stick-figure or abstract patterns in oil and burnt gunpowder, giving him a place in the experimental ferment preceding the '85 New Wave. However, Cai moved to Japan in 1986 as the movement was building.
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