Cai Guo-Qiang at the Venice Biennale

Not that I expected my blog to be a complete reflection of who I am as a person, I was really shocked to see how most of my recent posts have been food related… especially since all I feel like I’ve been doing is art history. Reading, writing, reading, writing, presenting, writing more, reading more… The past couple of weeks have been absolutely manic with back-to-back deadlines. As the last of these deadlines draws closer, and Spring Break (and Spring/Summer!! Woop!) is on the horizon, I thought I’d take a step back and reflect on all the crazy work I’ve been doing.

The second major piece of work I did for this course was an essay on the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, specifically focusing on the works he has displayed, and curated for, the Venice Biennale. Cai Guo-Qiang is one of the most internationally renowned Chinese artists right now. He left China in 1986 and has lived and worked in New York since 1995. Despite this, he was appointed as the Art Director of Visual and Special Effects for the Opening and Closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 – does everyone remember the incredible fireworks?! Cai Guo-Qiang has been invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale twice (1995, 1999), and in 2005 he was appointed by the Chinese government to curate the nation’s first ever national pavilion.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, 1995, Installation incorporating wooden fishing boat from Quanzhou, Chinese herbs, 100kg ginseng, 700 x 950 x 180 cm

I was instantly drawn to the theatrical flair that Cai displayed in his works, as well as the interesting self-orientalizing features that his works displayed. Having grown up in the era of the Cultural Revolution, when many traditional Chinese practices such as Traditional Chinese Medicine were considered feudal and archaic, and subsequently wiped out, it is interesting to see Cai employ such overt signifiers of Chinese culture. Coupled with the fact that Cai does not even live in China, I felt that Cai’s use of such signifiers served as a metaphor for East-West cultural divisions, as well as displaying tendencies of many émigré Chinese artists whose works present qualities of the Chinese diaspora.

Cai’s direct and deliberate reference towards Chinese iconography and materials is prevalent in his oeuvre. For the 46^th Venice Biennale Cai sent an old fashione fishing junk along Venice’s Grand Canal from Piazza San Marco to Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, where it was moored for the duration of the Venice Biennale. In Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, Cai ‘delivered’ to the biennale what he considered the Italian explorer ‘forgot’ to bring back 700 years ago: the ‘eastern spirit’. The junk contained Chinese medicinal herbs and other traditional goods such as 100 kilograms of ginseng, which he provided to ‘heal’ the city. Furthermore, Cai attempted to cleanse the water of the lagoon, widely acknowledged as the most polluted in the world, by ‘treating’ it with acupuncture. Cai confronts the exoticized perceptions of China by touching upon the cultural cliché of export. Perhaps such works have lead to criticism, such as that of Wang Nanming, who criticized such appropriations of Chinese culture by overseas Chinese artists, accusing them of manufacturing “Chinatown cultures” that bore little resemblance to the lived reality of China.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Yard, 1999, Installation incorporating 108 life-sized sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, 60 tons of clay, wire and wood armature. Realized at Deposito Polveri, Arsenale, Venice, Italy.

Cai returned to the Venice Biennale in 1999 where he exhibited his performance piece Venice’s Rent Collection Yard. Whilst he was awarded the highly esteemed Leone d’Oro for the work, the reception of the work in China was less than enthusiastic. He was sued by the Sichuan Arts Academy for violating copyright law, and Beijing-based Chinese artist Song Dong mocked Cai’s achievements by awarding him an ‘Award for Winning Without Making an Effort’. The work in question was a performance piece where Cai employed the motif of the seminal Rent Collection Yard tableaux and recreated the scene with ten sculptors creating replicas of the original sculpture using wire, wood and sixty tons of clay. Cai instructed the workers to abandon the production once he was awarded the Leone d’Oro, leaving the unfired clay figures to slowly dry and turn to dust as the biennale continued.

In his works, Cai mimics the reduction of Chinese culture with his presentation of simplified tropes that represent China. One could cynically interpret Cai’s method as a deliberate maneuver to appeal to ‘Western’ tastes – Cai was accused of this with his Venice Rent Collection Yard speaking directly to the personal interests of the then-curator Harold Szeeman. In his works exhibited at the Venice Biennale’s, I identify elements of easily-understood orientalist tropes through his self-orientalising.