(He remained in Japan until 1995, when he resettled in New York.) When lit, the material did not detonate but rather sizzled, leaving “an interesting surface typography”, Rivenc says. The Getty also took samples from transitional paintings in which Cai mixed gunpowder and realgar, an arsenic sulfide, into oil and acrylic paint, a process he started in China and continued when he moved to Japan in 1986. Limited mostly to whites and earth tones, they posed “no special conservation challenge”, Rivenc reports. The artist allowed the Getty scientists to take microscopic samples from some of the early figurative oils and gouaches executed in China in the early 1980s, often with paints he made on his own, and to chemically analyse the pigments. “In turn, those interview questions helped me to reflect on myself.” “Sometimes these dialogues were quite personal,” Cai says. For example, gunpowder, thought to have been invented in China in the ninth century, offered Cai a philosophical “opportunity for liberation” from “a timid and cautious personality”, she says, as well as a way to invoke the material’s association with traditional Chinese medicine. To that end, researchers have conducted probing interviews with the artist and recorded oral histories, with Rivenc crisscrossing the globe–even travelling to Cai’s birthplace of Quanzhou in China to gain insights from the artist’s early mentors. As onlookers watch tremulously, a blast ensues, and once assistants have stamped out embers and the smoke has cleared, the singed residue of the “drawing” is visible.Ĭai Guo-Qiang's Sunshine and Solitude (2010), installed at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City Photo: Diego Berruecos courtesy of MUACīeyond delving into processes like this one, the Getty was interested in exploring how Cai’s thinking, rooted in Taoism, alchemy, feng shui, astrophysics and cultural history, relates to his materials, and how he envisions his works lasting in years to come. Then he sprinkles gunpowder carefully around the lines, covers the ensemble with sheets of cardboard weighed down with bricks or rocks to control the force of the explosion, and lights the fuse. Sometimes he adds foliage or garments like abayas (for Memories (2011), presented in Doha, Qatar) to the mix. The artist sketches on high-quality Japanese paper placed on the floor, often also laying down stencils he has cut out from cardboard. Since then the institute has burrowed into the artist’s oeuvre and discovered that his works are surprisingly durable.Ĭai, an energetic international traveller who is based in New York, is perhaps best known for his gunpowder drawings. “We wanted to include more contemporary artists and a more diverse range and radical use of materials,” says Rivenc, who is leading the Cai study. So far every book has centred on a US or European artist who is no longer living: Willem de Kooning, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Lucio Fontana and Hans Hofmann. The goal was to produce a book about Cai for The Artist’s Materials series issued by Getty Publications. But the organisation had a counterproposal, she says: to investigate the full range of the artist’s oeuvre, including his early, more tentative oils, transitional works, black gunpowder drawings and visceral museum installations as well as the coloured gunpowder paintings. “We thought, ‘That’s great,’” says Rachel Rivenc, an associate scientist at the institute. To find out, the Chinese-born artist contacted the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles in early 2016, asking its staff to take a look at the works that he had started making by detonating daytime fireworks on canvas the previous year. But recently Cai became curious about another uncertainty: how his coloured gunpowder paintings will hold up over time. Crucial to his process is the element of surprise: a level of uncertainty and suspense about exactly what effect his detonations will have on his works on paper, for example, or how smoke will billow in ephemeral events like his project to extend the Great Wall of China with two fuse lines. The restlessly inventive artist Cai Guo-Qiang is known for his radical experimentation with materials-especially gunpowder, which he has used to ignite his drawings and to stage explosive events outdoors for awestruck viewers around the world.
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