Cai Guo-Qiang
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China ( 1957 ) - Artworks Wikipedia® - Cai Guo-Qiang
Christie's / May 25, 2013
€300,268.09 - €500,446.81
€313,740.00
Find artworks, auction results, sale prices and pictures of Cai Guo-Qiang at auctions worldwide.
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Cai Guoqiang
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Artworks in Arcadja
221
Some works of Cai Guo-Qiang
Extracted between 221 works in the catalog of Arcadja
Cai Guo-Qiang - Dragon Cypress
Original 2009
Auction:
Ravenel -
Jun 2, 2013- Taipei
Lot number:
732
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:
732
CAI Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957)
Dragon Cypress
2009
Gunpowder and ink on paper
306 x 402.5 cm
Signed lower right Cai Guo-Qiang in Chinese and Cai in English, titled Dragon Cypress in Chinese and English, dated 2009
Cai Guo-Qiang’’’’s works, whether, as in the present drawing, gunpowder on paper, installations, or firework events, show an extraordinary complexity of traditional Chinese thought, themes, beliefs and motifs, which hold a universal and very human appeal, allowing his ideas to have an immediate and strong impact for a worldwide audience which has embraced him as one of the leading Chinese contemporary artists.
Cai’’’’s early gunpowder works often depict motifs from the traditional Taoist beliefs of his grandmother who raised him as a child. Tigers, wolves, and mythical beasts occur frequently in his works representing the duality of nature, being both powerful and sublime while at the same time being destructive and frightening. In later works such as the present “Dragon Cypress” from 2009, Cai often depicts motifs such as acclaimed trees, flowers and birds from the traditional Confucius beliefs of his father, an accomplished ink and brush painter, which are imbued with serenity, calmness, tranquility and thousands of years of Chinese thought.
In “Dragon Cypress” Cai depicts a Dragon Cypress, which embodies the emotions, energies and life forces of his two belief systems. The Cypress is a symbol of longevity and abundance, its Chinese pronunciation ‘bai’’’’ being a homonym for the word “one hundred”. A constant recurring motif in Chinese paintings, poetry and literature, the evergreen qualities of the Cypress came to represent long-life and endurance, even in the depths of winter’’’’s hardships, the cypress stands tall and proud and full of life. Because of this it is perhaps the most revered of all Chinese plants and has a special place in Chinese philosophical thinking. A Dragon Cypress is so called because its trunk resembles the body of a dragon, and its leaves, the scales. Symbolizing power, strength, good fortune and benevolence, the dragon, emblem of the Chinese Emperor, stands for everything good in life and human nature.
In “Dragon Cypress” Cai has captured the full majestic power and meaning of this venerated tree. He has masterfully captured its strength, endurance, fortitude and vigor in the face of all adversity. Using gunpowder as his medium, the Cypress radiates positive and joyful energy imbued with a calmness and tranquility so much admired in traditional Chinese Confucian thought. This quiet calmness belies the powerful and destructive medium used to create it, gunpowder.
Cai was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province in China in 1958. Quanzhou is the center of fireworks production in China and Cai grew up surrounded by factories from which the smell of gunpowder constantly permeated. Also, at this time Kinmen Island of Taiwan was under relentless bombardment by Mainland Chinese forces so the air was filled with gunpowder smoke. So, Cai was fascinated with gunpowder from a very early age. As an emotional, creative and sensitive youngster he was drawn to both the destructive and constructive power of gunpowder. It can destroy buildings and lives, but it can also produce wonderful firework experiences.
Searching for a medium that could release him and allow him to express himself freely, Cai began to incorporate different materials in his art. Porcelain, Chinese herbal medicine, kites, bamboo rafts, fengshui and, of course, gunpowder. He also tried different methods to find creativity with traditional ink and oil painting. Obsessed with natural forces and their ability to profoundly effect their environment, he tried to harness some of them to create his art. He used a fan on wet paint to create typhoon effects, fire to blister it, and a dove to walk across his canvas. However, it was gunpowder that finally set him free. He was drawn to its spontaneity, the powerful release of energy, the unknown and unpredictable result of using it. Over many years he has perfected his techniques for using this destructive material to produce both stunning explosion events and gunpowder drawings of which “Dragon Cypress” is one.
Cai’’’’s medium and method is but one aspect of his art. His art is complex and unique, flowing from a very expressive, energetic and creative mind, which is a product of his origins, his experiences, his beliefs and his sensitivities. At a very early age Cai experienced the duality present in life. The concept of duality is central to the Chinese life-experience, the ying and the yang being the most widely known expressions of this. Life is complex, and we constantly have different forces pulling and tugging us in different directions.
Cai Guo-Qiang is perhaps the most internationalized of contemporary Chinese artists and he is regularly hailed in the international press as a global artist. He was the first Chinese artist to hold a solo exhibition at the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York. The groundbreaking exhibition “I want to Believe” also travelled to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and then to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain in 2009. Running for a total of 2 years from 2008 to 2009, it attracted the most visitors ever for a Guggenheim exhibition, and placed Cai firmly in the ranks of the foremost contemporary artists. He also created the acclaimed fireworks display for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, which made him a household name worldwide.
Created in 2009, “Dragon Cypress” embodies the maturing qualities of calmness and tranquility that Cai seems to have experienced after his recent great successes. A profound and majestic work incorporating the great dualities, which he has become renowned for expressing, it is a superb representative work of this great artist. (Text by David Kearney)
Cai Guo-Qiang - Black Peony
Original 2008
Auction:
Christie's -
May 26, 2013- Hong Kong
Lot number:
105
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:
Cai Guo Qiang (b. 1957)
Black Peony
signed 'Cai' in Pinyin; numbered '9/20'; dated '2008' (lower left)
Executed in 2008
edition 9/20
gunpowder on porcelain
66 x 36.6 cm. (26 x 14 3/8 in.)
21st Century
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Cai Guo-Qiang: Hanging Out in the Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2009 (illustrated, p. 182).
Cai Guo-Qiang - Boat (a Set Of 2)
Original 2003
Auction:
Ravenel -
May 26, 2013- Hong Kong
Lot number:
524
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:
524
CAI Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957)
Boat (a set of 2)
2003
Gunpowder on paper
63 x 98 cm (each)
Signed upper right Cai in Chinese and English, titled Boat in Chinese, dated 2003
Ravenel Spring Auction 2013 Hong Kong
524
CAI Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957)
Boat (a set of 2)
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Descriptions:
This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity issued by Eslite Gallery, Taipei.
Imagery of "ships" and "boats" has always had significant meaning in Cai Guo-Qiang's work. Cai's birthplace, Quanzhou, was the site at which Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) once built and launched the largest ship in the world, and was also the starting point of the maritime Silk Road to Southeast Asia. In 1994, Cai accomplished one of his most important works in Iwaki, Japan "Returning the Light: From the Pan-Pacific" He transformed the exhibition hall space into a scene from the Pacific Ocean with a shipwreck and glinting sea salt to reflect the history of Iwaki.
The following year, at the 46th Venice Biennale, Cai's "Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot" shipped assorted drinks soaked in Chinese medicine from Quanzhou to the Port of Venice by tracing the original route through which the West first ‘discovered' the East over 700 years ago. The symbolic use of ships has continued to appear in Cai's works ever since. To him, ships represent not only his hometown, but also foreign lands. Cai has also described himself as a small ship floating and oscillating between various cultures. The only constant, however, is that this particular ship comes from Quanzhou.
"Boat" is one of Cai's creations associated with the imagery of a ship. The two ships are derived from the same entity, reflecting Cai's poetic reminiscence of his hometown between the virtual and the real.
(Excerpted from Cai Guo Qiang!, written by Cai Guo-Qiang, Leslie Ma, and Chin Yachun, edited by Chin Yachun, published by Eslite Corporation, December, 2009.)
Cai Guo-Qiang - Man, Eagle And Eye In The Sky: Eagles
Original 2003
Auction:
Christie's -
May 25, 2013- Hong Kong
Lot number:
43
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:
Cai Guo Qiang (b. 1957)
Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky: Eagles
signed 'Cai Guo-Qiang' in Pinyin; dated '2003'; titled 'Eagle: Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky' (lower right)
paper
overall: 230 x 310 cm. (90 1/2 x 122 in.)
21st Century
1
Albion Gallery, London, UK
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Albion/Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art Ltd., Cai Guo-Qiang: Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky, London, UK, 2004 (illustrated, p. 140).
Engaging the Transcendental Power of Art in a Social Context
In November 2003, Cai Guo-qiang produced the social project Man, Eagle, and Eye in the Sky at the Siwa Oasis, Egyptian Sahara Desert. The project was made in collaboration with over 600 school children from 40 schools throughout the Governate of Marsa Matruh. Commissioned by the Siwa Art Project, an organization that promotes Siwa's cultural heritage internationally in an ecologically sensitive manner, the interactive, community-based project utilized 200 Chinese kites that were painted by the school children, and then flown in the desert skies. At the end of the five-day project the kites were exploded with gunpowder.
From 1997 onwards, kites have become part of Cai's visual vocabulary, as a representation of a union between man and heaven, an interactive medium between viewers and the art, and an object that integrates and extends the spatial arrangements in his performance and installation pieces. For the Siwan project, Cai used three emblematic motifs: Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky. "Man" signifies humankind as an agent of history; "Eagle" symbolizes Alexander the Great, who received an oracle in Siwa; and "Eye in the Sky" represents humankind's vision.
Cai led painting workshops and painted 300 kites brought from Weifang, China, the city that hosts the annual Weifang International Kite Festival. The colourfully painted kites demonstrate imaginations of children who were involved. Some older boys helped fly these kites over desert skies, over temple ruins and mud-brick houses. At the end of the week, one hundred kites were tied together and linked with gunpowder fuse, and then exploded at sunset across the White Mountain, as the inhabitants of Siwa watched the explosion from 300 meters below. Cai memorialized the project by creating a series of gunpowder drawings. The work that best display Cai's unique creative concepts and achievements from this extraordinary series is Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky: Eagles (Lot 43) is offered here in the Evening Sale.
The project demonstrates Cai as a transnational artist who constantly challenges the function and meaning of art within a wider socio-cultural context. As Reiko Tomii puts it, "Man, Eagle, and Eye in the Sky best exemplifies the four most salient characteristics of Cai's social project: his exploration of the symbolic power of art in a social context; his profound interest in local history and culture and astute incorporation of them into a project; his active collaboration with the local people at all levels, from children to government officials; and his contribution, both cultural and economic, to the local community." (Guggenheim Museum Publications, Cai Guoqiang - I Want To Believe, New York, USA, 2008, p. 254). During the processes, as Sharmini Pererira notes, the end point of the artwork shifts from something enclosed and pre-determined to something characterized by processes of dialogue and negotiation that arise through the interaction of situations, individuals, groups, terrains and factors which lie predominantly outside the field of art. (Albion/Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art Ltd., Cai Guoqiang: Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky, London, UK, 2004, p. 13)
Cai's contraction to extreme site-specificity and a conscious and constant endeavor to transcend cultural and historical limitations in his projects, poignantly demonstrates the artist's utopian ideals of social engagement and mobilization, and his core belief in the transformational quality of art and culture in society. As such, Cai's Eagles combine time, process, action, observation, performance, and events into a unique art form, an aesthetic that rejects materialist tendencies and embraces the unpredictable. The work derives universal meanings extending far beyond the moment and the immediate locality, generating a new focus on our cultures and interpersonal relationships. As even the most local of arts or cultures can still be linked to world trends, and for Cai, this is perhaps where cross-regionalism begins to extend toward a greater world unity.
Eagles in the Sky
Eye-Kite Flying People describes Cai's expression of a particularly important moment of the project that features eagle-shaped kites hovering over the Great Sand Sea in Siwa. The eagles represent Alexander the Great traversing across the Saharan desert to consult its famed Oracle at the Temple of Amun. He purportedly asked two questions, "Will I rule the world?" and "Am I the Son of God?" to which the response was allegedly in the affirmative.
Cai's choice of the motif of the eagle in its local context of Egypt leads participants and viewers of the project to immediately consider the ancient Egyptian symbol of the falcon, which represents Horus, the god of the sky. In mythology, the image is also associated with the God Zeus of the Greeks, and Jupiter of the Romans. The eagle symbolizes strength, courage and immortality, and is deemed as the king of the air and the messenger of the highest Gods. As such, even in contemporary times, the symbol of the Eagle of Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt, is represented in the Egyptian coat of arms.
The project evokes an aura of magic and mystery in Cai's inspiration from ancient heroes, Egyptian imagery and hieroglyphs, Oracles and fortune-telling. But this is in essence also informed by Cai's own belief in destiny and metaphysical matters: "I believe in unseen energies and forcesK. Perhaps this sounds a bit mystical from a western perspective, but many of my concerns are quite commonplace for Chinese. For example the concept of fengshui is deeply seated and has been a part of my family's vocabulary since my birth. It has formed a firm and natural foundation for my world view. I am merely bravely presenting it in my work and not avoiding what is obvious to me". (Albion/Michael Hue-Williams Fine Art Ltd., Cai Guoqiang: Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky, London, UK, 2004, p. 125)
Cai contends the notions of tradition and modernity, creation and destruction, yet these are not polarized through his artworks and he more achieves a merger of the two. This manner of viewing dualities is a strongly Chinese approach - such as the yin and yang - a balance of opposing forces that achieve harmony in nature. In accordance with the philosophical and religious perceptions upon which Taoism, fengshui and other teachings are based, Cai perceives man and the universe as a unified whole. "[I wish to] travel in time, like the fengshui masters and alchemists of ancient times, from the very origins of mankind into the future; to move freely back and forth between the East and West, from micro to macro realms, and between global and local worlds."
Aesthetically, Cai has contributed a genuinely new and innovative approach to contemporary art-making. The furious energy of his gunpowder drawings juxtapose symbols that are significant for both Western and Eastern audiences alike. Blasting gunpowder on a four paneled screen for Eagles is practical in design yet grand in presentation. Screens have a distinct Asian component as its traditions originated in Japan for its ritualistic, decorative and functional qualities. It is also a screen of powerful yet gentle visual properties. The forms of the people and kites are evoked by a combination of pigment and explosion; people in turn emerge from the contrast of white pigment against the gunpowder that outlines their silhouettes. The techniques imbue the eye-kites with a cosmic almost decorative element that transcends a mere "realistic" or descriptive representation. The structure of the composition here reminds the viewer of descriptions of constellations, imaginative articulations of points of light in the night sky that illustrate archetypal and mythological stories about the formation of the universe. At the same time emphasized the gulf between human and the mighty eyes in the sky, representation of humankind's vision.
This re-ordering of the scale and viewer's position has been an essential strategy for Cai. As he did throughout his Projects for Extraterrestrials series, he reimagines that typical scale on which we imagine natural and historical events. Here he has taken a dramatic but simple image of kite-flying and elevated it to the status of a grand metaphor for humanity and relationship with God. The eyes, symbolic of all-seeing power of God in Christianity, symbol of protection and life in ancient Egypt, appear to be looming like a curtain against the sky, almost extraterrestrial looking. Considering within the body of Cai's post-9/11 works, the mythic appearance of these eye-kites in the vast sky remind us that such relationship between god and humans, and sky and earth are as old as time itself. Cai introduces a unique concept all his own, while embracing the social context and sense of community of the project. Through his art, he introduces the common symbols and metaphysical concerns, evoking ancient and modern civilization, in order to stimulate exchanges and dialogues between humankind. As Cai recreates these ideas through his explosive art, exploring the Earth's history and civilization, he urges viewers to leave behind narrow individual perspectives and view spectacles of primordial chaos and creation, offering them new realizations about the universe, nature, and the traces of life on Earth.
Cai Guo-Qiang - Study For A Wolf’’’’s Bodily Movement: For Head On
Original 2006
Other WORKS AT AUCTIONDescription:
Cai Guo-Qiang
Quanzhou/Fujian 1957 – lives in New York
STUDY FOR A WOLF’’’’S BODILY MOVEMENT: FOR HEAD ON
2006. Nine sculptures, each synthetic resin in grey.
Between 16,7 x 12,7 cm and 15,5 x 21,5 cm (6 ⅝ x 5 in. and 6 ⅛ x 8 ½ in.)
Each signed and inscribed A – I with gold pen on the underside resp. on the abdomen (two figures).
Each from the edition of 11 numbered copies (from a total of 29 copies) in the original wooden box. Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, 2006, edition no. 36.
Figure C with small damage.