Cai Guo-qiang on his Palace Museum show in Beijing: ‘I don’t see this as a cost to my art’

By Enid Tsui and Elaine Yau

Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang’s solo exhibition at Beijing’s Palace Museum at first appears to be a Homeric homecoming after a tortuous journey.

As over 700 VIPs gathered on a wintry afternoon on December 14 to await the opening of Cai’s “Odyssey and Homecoming” inside the Forbidden City – a custodian of national treasures that for most of its 600-year history had granted entry only to those deemed worthy by the emperor – there was a touch of a conquering hero making his long-awaited return.

Cai, who left his homeland 34 years ago, first made his mark on the international art world by harnessing the terrible powers of one of the four apocryphal “great inventions of China”: gunpowder.

Models of buildings of the Palace Museum displayed next to Cai’s VR show at the Palace Museum. Photo: Simon Song

Using the explosive material, his early work Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 2 (1989) shows the scorch marks of a lightning bolt that has shot up a mountain from the perspective of alien visitors from above. In the piece, Cai fuses the Eastern and Western art worlds: the mountain is Mount Sainte-Victoire, the French peak made famous in Paul Cezanne’s paintings, while the dragon is the quintessential symbol of China...READ MORE

Cover Image: Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang outside the Palace Museum in Beijing, China, where his new show, “Odyssey and Homecoming”, is being held. Photo: Simon Song