What is the ninth wave Cai Guo-Qiang about?
Cai Guo-Qiang: The Ninth Wave, 蔡國强：九級浪 Exploring the imminent challenge posed by the environment, the artist references a theme in traditional Chinese aesthetics and philosophy: humanity’s longing to return to a primordial landscape and spiritual homeland.
What is Cai Guo-Qiang known for?
Cai Guo-Qiang, (born December 8, 1957, Quanzhou, Fujian province, China), Chinese pyrotechnical artist known for his dramatic installations and for using gunpowder as a medium. Gunpowder was an ancient Chinese invention and a thoroughly traditional substance.
What is Cai Guo-Qiang doing now?
Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese: 蔡国强; born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City and New Jersey.
Why did Cai Guo-Qiang make the Ninth Wave?
Cai Guo-Qiang, The Ninth Wave. The Ninth Wave, named after Ivan Aivazovsky’s eponymous painting, was in part inspired by the 16,000 dead pigs that came floating down the Huangpu last year, at least some of which had been infected with the porcine circovirus.
How does Sky ladder work?
Perhaps Cai’s most compelling, personal work yet, Sky Ladder is a 1,650-foot-tall ladder, held aloft by a giant balloon and rigged with explosives. As the massive sculpture ignites, it creates a fiery vision that miraculously ascends to the heavens.
Why did Cai Guo-Qiang use gunpowder?
Proficient in a variety of mediums, Cai began using gunpowder in his work to foster spontaneity and confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China at the time.
What was Cai Guo Qiang influenced by when creating the work?
Spirituality, and its link between the seen and unseen worlds, is a constant source of inspiration for the artist who delves into historical Chinese traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, Feng Shui, Qi Gong, Confucianism, and other practices, to explore and find fodder for his work.
Why did Aivazovsky paint the Ninth Wave?
The debris, in the shape of the cross, appears to be a Christian metaphor for salvation from the earthly sin. The painting has warm tones, which reduce the sea’s apparent menacing overtones and a chance for the people to survive seems plausible. This painting shows both the destructiveness and beauty of nature.
What did Cai Guo-Qiang do in Shanghai?
Cai’s work in front of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, China is eight minutes of colors filling the sky, in a ritualistically sincere elucidation of the ‘death of nature’. The show personifies the natural world with remembrance, looking back on the past and the transitory nature of time through a display of colorful smoke.
What makes Cai Guo Qiang’s skywriting so special?
Cai involves organic vegetable dyes as opposed to just gunpowder. The smoke from these “explosion events” gradually blurs in the air, almost as ink from a brushstroke is absorbed by rice paper in traditional painting. His daylight skywriting signifies his deep traditionalism and his modernism all at once.
What kind of fireworks does Cai Guo Qiang use?
He is known for a remarkable new kind of fireworks spectacle, which he calls “explosion events.” He has taken gunpowder, one of China’s Four Great Inventions 1 and led the way in a new impressive form of art that is substantial and metaphorical.
Where is Cai Guo Qiang’s Odyssey and Homecoming?
“Odyssey and Homecoming” is itself the second iteration of an eponymous show presented in 2020 at the museum of the Forbidden City in Beijing. It is divided in three distinct parts. “Encounter with the Unknown”, a stand-alone installation work of the same name (2021) placed in the towering central atrium of the museum.