Exhibition - Cai Guo-Qiang
Ramble in the Cosmos―From Primeval Fireball Onward
The National Art Center, Tokyo
Exhibition: 29 June - 21 August, 2023
Opening: Thursday, 29th June, 2023 10:00 am
Cai Guo-Qiang, Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows, 1998.
Courtesy to The Museum of Modern Art and the artist.
Internationally renowned contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, will hold a large-scale solo exhibition in collaboration with Saint Laurent. Cai is known for her gunpowder paintings, installations, and outdoor bombing events. The nearly nine years he spent in Japan (from the end of 1986 until his 1995) were a pivotal period in his artistic career. Based on Cai's groundbreaking exhibition "Primitive Fireball" (his artistic big bang), this exhibition provides an overview of Cai's artistic journey through themes of space and the invisible world. His work has encompassed numerous artistic media, including drawing, painting, installation, video and performance art. Drawing on Eastern philosophies and contemporary social issues as a conceptual underpinning, his work is often site-specific, responding to local culture and history and connecting the viewer with the larger universe around him.
With images of explosion and an aesthetic of pain, he draws us into his work. He captures the remnants of human aggression, the instinctive traces of violence against nature, and our collective future. He presents these traumatic visions in an endless loop and invites us to seek ways to break the cycle of human history. As we bear the weight of these revelations, we draw hope from human ingenuity and our shared legacy of great progress. We recognize the immense power of our species, both in our ability to destroy the environment through exploitation, and in our potential to improve life on earth through our creativity and ingenuity.
About:
Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy from 1981 until 1985. He lives and works in New York. He has received many important awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 2009 Fukoka Prize. In 2012, he was honored as a Laureate for the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in the painting category. His recent honors include the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award in 2015, the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art in 2016, and the 7th Isamu Noguchi Award in 2020. Cai also served as a member of the core creative team and as the director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. For the past three decades, Cai has held numerous solo exhibitions in major art centers around the world, including Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006 and his retrospective I Want to Believe at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. His 2013 solo exhibition Da Vincis do Povo toured to three cities in Brazil, attracting over one million visitors. The Rio de Janeiro edition became the most-visited exhibition of any living artist in the world that year. In 2015, Cai’s explosion event Sky Ladder was realized off of Huiyu Island in his hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian. The artwork became the centerpiece of an eponymous Netflix documentary, directed by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald. His other important recent projects include the solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: The Transient Landscape at the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia, 2019) and the explosion event Encounter with the Unknown: Cosmos Project for Mexico (Mexico, 2019).
Website: www.nact.jp
The National Art Center, Tokyo
The National Art Center, Tokyo is located in Japan
The National Art Center, Tokyo
7 Chome-22-2 Roppongi, Minato City
Tokyo 106-8558
T: (+81) 47-316-2772
E: pr@nact.jp
