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INTRODUCTION
Over the past 25 years, Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced
tsai gwo-chang
) has created a unique body of
work characterised by the grandness of its scale
and ambition. Cai’s installations, social projects,
gunpowder drawings and explosion events have
been presented in prestigious museums and
public spaces throughout the world. His works
are spectacular in staging and effect, yet they are
always underpinned by deeply felt philosophical
meditations on the transformative forces that
impact and flow from human life: science and faith,
beauty and violence, history and current events.
Cai has a longstanding relationship with the Gallery.
His participation in the second and third editions
of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
in 1996 and 1999 was an important catalyst for
the Gallery in broadening the scope and scale of
its artistic projects and opening up new ways of
working with artists and audiences. At the same
time, these projects led the artist to create a range
of participatory projects with children and families
that have become a hallmark of his work.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou,
Fujian province, China. He trained in stage design at
the Shanghai Theatre Academy and lived in Japan
from 1986-1995. He has been based in New York
since 1995.
Recent solo exhibitions have included ‘Cai Guo‑Qiang:
Da Vincis do Povo’, in Brasília, São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil (2013); ‘A Clan of Boats’, Faurschou
Foundation, Copenhagen (2012); ‘Cai Guo-Qiang:
Sky Ladder’, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles (2012); and ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab’,
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar
(2011). In 2008, his retrospective ‘Cai Guo-Qiang:
I Want to Believe’ at the Guggenheim Museum,
New York, broke audience records. Cai served as
Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008
Summer Olympics in Beijing and has won numerous
awards; most recently, in 2012, he was the recipient
of the Praemium Imperiale for Painting, Japan,
and a Medal of Arts from the US State Department.
FALLING BACK TO EARTH
‘Falling Back to Earth’ – Cai’s first solo exhibition in
Australia – focuses on humanity’s relationship with
nature, which was inspired by the unique landscapes
of Queensland and Chinese literati (scholarly)
painting and poetry, and evokes the yearning for
nature and home expressed in Tao Yuanming’s
classic fourth-century poem ‘Ah, homeward bound
I go!’ The works in this exhibition reflect on the idea
of coming full circle – of working through competing
aspects of human nature, as well as the obstacles
we face in our relationships with our environment
and each other, now and into the future.
The exhibition consists of four installations including
two new commissioned works inspired by the
Queensland landscape –
Heritage
and
Eucalyptus
–
as well as
Tea Pavilion
, a space for rest, and
Head
On
, one of Cai’s signature works.
Heritage
has
been acquired for the Gallery’s Collection with the
generous support of the Josephine Ulrick and Win
Schubert Diversity Foundation through and with the
assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery
of Modern Art Foundation.
The exhibition features a series of new interactive
projects, an animation and a book for children
developed by the artist and the Children’s Art
Centre. Also on display in the Asian Galleries
at the Queensland Art Gallery is Cai’s major
gunpowder drawing
Nine Dragon Wall (Drawing
for Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified
or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 28)
created for 'The Second Asia Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art' in 1996 and now part of the
Gallery’s Collection.
