Chinese artist's exploding cars take over Guggenheim
2008-02-21

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Works by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang are taking over New York's Guggenheim Museum from Friday, transforming the building's iconic rotunda with exploding cars and flying wolves.

The retrospective is the museum's first for a Chinese artist and was described by the museum's director, Thomas Krens, as "one of the most, if not the most ambitious physical installations that we've ever done."

The most startling work of the exhibition is Cai's "Inopportune: Stage One," made up of nine cars filled with light tubes that give the impression of being frames from a movie of a car exploding upwards through the central atrium.

Other works displayed on the ramp that leads visitors around the museum's rotunda include "Head On," featuring a stream of 99 wolves that start on the ground and end up flying though the air before crashing into a glass wall.

The exhibition also features photographs of so-called explosion events choreographed by Cai, who is also the director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of this year's Beijing Olympic Games.

Cai, born in 1957, is known for the social and political commentary in his work and compared the exhibition to a walk through a scroll of his life.

Speaking through an interpreter, he described how he aimed through his works to depict "the contradictions of violence and beauty."

"I think this is clearly one of the greatest exhibitions we've ever done here. It may even be the greatest -- we will see," Krens told reporters.

The director said that while Cai's works owed much to his upbringing in China under the Cultural Revolution, they had a more universal appeal.

"His large-scale installations just gather in power, they are impressive, they are clearly referential to his particular experience in China, they are referential to Chinese history, to Chinese culture to Chinese attitudes.

"Yet they also communicate with a remarkable universal authority. The language of Cai Guo-Qiang's art is unmistakable and its power is unmistakable," Krens said.

The exhibition, he said, would help focus attention in the West on what he called "a whole emerging cadre of young important contemporary artists."

"Cai Guo-Qiang may be simply the tip of the iceberg that is moving in our direction," he said, describing the artist as possibly "the first truly global contemporary artist that we have presented here."

Other works in the exhibition "I Want to Believe" include Cai's "Inopportune: Stage Two," made up of life-sized tigers pierced with arrows, as well as his signature gunpowder drawings, continuing his explosive theme.

The exhibition runs until May 28.