Video: "Head On". 99 wolves in an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
During his long artistic career, Cai Guo-Qiang has created many different works of art. About one direction of his work - gunpowder paintings - the readers of our blog already have some idea. It's time to get to know the author not only as an artist, but also as an installation master.
For his solo exhibition at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, Cai Guo-Qiang created a large-scale work called "Head On". This huge, dynamic installation depicts a pack of wolves running along a gallery and crashing into a transparent glass wall. The pack, it should be noted, is rather big - as many as 99 wolves! And although the leader has already encountered an obstacle, the rest of the animals continue to run, repeating the fate of their leader.
Since the installation took place in Berlin, many are trying to connect the work of Cai Guo-Qiang with the history of Germany: with the events of the Second World War or with the Berlin Wall. The author himself insists that he did not have any specific associations in the process of creating the installation, and his work is about humanity as a whole. “I tried to portray animals who would represent collective heroism, who would love company and live in a pack. I wanted to show a universal human tragedy that resulted from a blind desire to run forward, the desire to achieve their goals without any compromise. This repeats itself constantly, throughout the history of mankind. This idea can be found in Zen philosophy, according to which most of what happens does not matter,”says the author.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, PRC. From 1986 to 1995, the author lived in Japan, after which he moved to New York. In 1999, Cai Guo-Qiang was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
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