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Cai Guo-Qiang Burns Down China Post
Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese contemporary artist responsible for what will be no doubt a spectacular Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, has been turning what little time he has to the creation of a new ‘fireworks’ series of art, this time with China Post stamps. The artist, well known for his work with gunpowder, fireworks, and ‘exploding cars’, has recently been exhibiting at the Guggenheim and will feature at the China National Museum during the Olympics. Cai initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature “explosion events,” artistically choreographed shows incorporating fireworks and other pyrotechnics.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, computers, vending machines, wildlife, portraiture, non-Han Chinese citizens and their cultures, fireworks and gunpowder. Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong’s tenet “destroy nothing, create nothing.” The China Post series has taken a block of Chinese stamps, with small firecrackers placed on them. These are then ignited, with the resulting scorch marks and burns, occurring only on the blank pieces between the actual stamps themselves, adding a “natural authenticity to the ultimate destruction of the depicted flowers”. This is one of his latest works, involving gunpowder being used in this manner and is dated 2008.
More Info, including biographies and museum links:
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The Beijing Olympics wont be one to forget quickly.