Cai-Guo Qiang's Collaboration with Issey Miyake

I went to the Guggenheim with my parents this past Saturday. It was the first time I've gone to an art museum with my dad - I have previously gone to see the David Smith centennial in the spring of 2006 with my mom - and it was surprising because even though I knew I would enjoy going with them simply for the pleasure of spending time with them, I also benefited from my dad's knowledge of Chinese allegory in looking at Cai-Guo Qiang's work.

Cai-Guo Qiang is a Chinese artist of Fujianese descent in his 50s who has exhibited widely and grown to international prominence over the years with his continuous work in gunpowder in the form of drawings as well as site-specific explosion-happenings. Not knowing anything about his work, for Qiang's mid-career retrospective entitled I Want To Believe, I was only prepared to see the procession of life-sized wolves heading with disastrous conclusion toward a transparent glass wall, a representation of the Berlin Wall, that I had seen in Time Out and New York magazine, as well as what all the posters in the subway showed which were a troupe of white sedans festooned with multichannel light tubes dangling from the central ceiling of the museum. I was not prepared for his beautiful drawings, some quite small in scale, some monumental in size, that were made by placing gunpowder down on the paper and then exploding it. I was also extremely captivated by his series called Projects for Extraterrestrials, specifically Project 10, where he attempted to conceptually extend the length of the Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters by using gunpowder that he laid down and then exploded - what a magnificent spectacle that also has much deeper implications.

Going back to the title of this post, what I loved seeing the most at the exhibit was a continuous piece of white, intricately pleated fabric that was displayed as a hanging spiral which had the brownish, brackish remnants, charred in some places, of exploded gunpowder. This fabric was the result of a collaboration between Cai-Guo Qiang and Issey Miyake for Miyake's Pleats Please series, which he had begun in 1996, inviting different artists to use his fabric as the medium for their imagery. Cai-Guo Qiang chose to use the fabric in an action performance piece called Dragon-Explosion in which he laid down the fabric on the gallery floor in the shape of a dragon, the Chinese symbol of life, sprinkled gunpowder across it and ignited the gunpowder.