Reflection-A Gift from Iwaki, 2004. Caspar H. Schübbe Collection
Excavated wooden boat and porcelain, Dimensions variable, Photo: Erika Baraona-Ede ©FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2009

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
March 17 - September 20, 2009
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Abandoibarra Et. 2
Bilbao


Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time. He draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence. This retrospective presents the full spectrum of the artist's protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity.

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe charts the artist's creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings; explosion events; installations; and social projects. With more than 40 works from the 1980s to the present-selected from major public and private collections in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-the exhibition examines Cai's significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art and establishes his influence as a cultural producer of socially-provocative spectacles for large audiences, including his recent work as a core member of the creative team that planned the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Organized by Thomas Krens and Alexandra Munroe, this comprehensive retrospective is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao's first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist.

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. The son of a historian and painter, Cai was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. His work has, since the outset, been scholarly and often politically charged. He initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China at the time. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his signature explosion events, exemplified in the series Projects for Extraterrestrials. Cai quickly achieved international prominence during his tenure in Japan, and since 1995, he has lived in New York. His approach draws on a wide variety of symbols, traditions, and materials such as feng shui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, kites, boats, computers, live animals, and vending machines.

Cai was selected as a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize and was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. His solo exhibition at Mass MoCA won Best Monographic Museum Show, and Inopportune: Stage One won Best Installation or Single Work in a Museum from the International Association of Art Critics, New England in 2005. In 2007, he was awarded the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize.

Among his many solo exhibitions and projects are Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006; Inopportune, Mass MoCA, North Adams, 2005; Traveler, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2004; Transient Rainbow, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Cai Guo-Qiang, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2002; APEC Cityscape Fireworks Show, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Shanghai, 2001. Cai was Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, and organized and curated BMoCA: Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen, Taiwan, 2004.

Most recently, Cai's retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York opened in February 2008, traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in summer 2008, and is currently on show in Guggenheim Bilbao till 20 September 2009.