AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

Cai Guo-Qiang is one of the most prominent contemporary Chinese artists active today. Based in New York, he works and exhibits internationally. Cai uses a wide variety of media, including paintings, installations, videos, but has become especially known for his systematic use of gunpowder to create gunpowder drawings and paintings, some of them on a very large scale. For almost three decades, he worked mostly with black gunpowder but has recently (2015) started using colored gunpowders to produce more sensuous and lavish compositions. He also uses gunpowders and fireworks to create ephemeral explosion events and community projects. Cai’s works encapsulates many of the issues inherent to contemporary art, such as the adoption of a non-artistic process as a signature medium, as well as working across a wide variety of genres and media including some traditional ones all the way to ephemeral practices, community participation and the incorporation of new technologies. The GCI has embarked on a collaboration with the studio to systematically document the materials and processes used by Cai Guo-Qiang for his work across media. The goal is to understand how the adoption of gunpowder has influenced Cai’s artistic practice; how his use of materials has evolved throughout his career; and the artist’s attitude towards materials, making, and conservation. The interdisciplinary approach combines numerous interviews with the artist, technical examination of a large corpus of gunpowder drawings, paintings and installations (including early transitional works mixing painting with gunpowder), scientific analyses, as well as the use of microfadeometry and artificial weathering to predict the aging of some of his work such as the colored gunpowder paintings. This paper will detail the findings of the project to date and explore the role that material studies can play in the understanding, interpretation, display, presentation and preservation of Cai’s work.