Exhibition of a Chinese artist in Pushkin. Project "Cai Guoqiang"

Alexandra Danilova

Curator of the exhibition “Cai Guoqiang. October", Deputy Head of the Department of Art of European and American Countries of the 19th–20th Centuries, State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin

There has never been an exhibition of this scale in Moscow before

Cai Guoqiang is one of the most famous artists of our time, whose achievements are too long to list - suffice it to say that he extended the Great Wall of China by 10 kilometers, received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and did a project dedicated to the anniversary of 9/11 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (it was a powder explosion in the form of a black cloud).

The exhibition “October” cannot be repeated

The exhibition was conceived as a single artistic space, which begins with an installation of cribs in front of the façade and continues inside the museum: the work “Sound” is mounted above the main staircase; gunpowder paintings, 20 meters long, “River” and “Garden” hang in the White Hall. , in the center of the hall is the installation “Earth”. Cai Guoqiang came up with this project specifically for the size of the Pushkin Museum - the height and width of the museum's portico dictated to him how tall the installation that greets visitors and the works that are inside the museum should be.

The paintings and installations were created specifically for the Pushkin Museum and have not been exhibited before

Almost all the works were prepared specifically for the Pushkin Museum - the exhibition will have only 7 old works that are needed to tell who Cai Guoqiang is. All other works were made 2 weeks before the opening of the exhibition. For the Pushkin Museum, Guoqiang specially created 20-meter-long gunpowder canvases, a huge installation of baby strollers, cribs and cradles in the courtyard, and many other works.

Cai Guoqiang learned to write in Russian

And this is not just calligraphy, but calligraphy in Russian letters. In order to create inscriptions in Russian, Guoqiang had to specially learn the Russian alphabet. It turned out that the Russian language is very difficult for calligraphy: unlike China, where there are strict rules for writing hieroglyphs, the letters A and D in the Russian alphabet can be written in different ways, each of which will be correct.

Cai Guoqiang created the largest painting using the color gunpowder painting technique

Colored gunpowder painting is a new technique for Tsai, which he has only been working with for two years. Before the Moscow exhibition, his largest works were five meters high. The 20-meter painting “River,” which can be seen in the Pushkin Museum, is his absolute record. He created it in two days, since working in such a technique requires efficiency - leaving scattered gunpowder in the pavilion even for one night is unsafe. You can lay out the stencils as much as you like, but the process of applying gunpowder itself must fit into daylight hours.

A huge team worked on the exhibition

In Moscow, 100 people worked with the artist as one team: volunteers laid out a canvas from historical photographs, taught Tsai the Cyrillic alphabet, cut out stencils and extinguished the sparks that smoldered on the canvas. These people also became part of the work - just like the ten invited sculptors in the 1999 Venice Biennale project, for which the artist received the Golden Lion. In Venice, people reproduced 108 works from the socialist realist sculptural composition “The Court of the Tax Collector.” From Tsai’s other projects, one can remember how children in Egypt and Rio, together with the artist, made kites, and in Iwaki (a city in the Fukushima region), at his request, residents simultaneously turned off the lights in their homes.

Viewers can see “drafts” of Guoqiang’s works for the first time

For the first time, Cai Guoqiang allows viewers into the kitchen of his artistic process. He shows both trial powder tests and sketches that he made specifically for this project. Cai Guoqiang had never exhibited stencils in his life, and at the exhibition in the Pushkin Museum you can see stencils of the painting “River” with traces of gunpowder that remained from the explosion.

Part of this project was supposed to be on Red Square

Cai Guoqiang is the only one who knows how to make colorful fireworks during the day. He calls these fireworks a kind of performance - Tsai's dream was a fireworks display on Red Square. He wanted to collect all the images of the exhibition on the square: white birch trees, Tchaikovsky’s music, Malevich’s triptych.

This project is very personal for the artist

Tsai's project is dedicated not so much to the October Revolution, but to the revolution in general and the feelings of the person who experiences it. It is no coincidence that Tsai includes a huge number of works in the exhibition - memories of her childhood. This gesture is a trust in our public, in which Tsai hopes to find an interlocutor. Russians who have gone through similar events understand what is happening in nuanced terms - why teachers who were teased by Tsai mysteriously disappeared, why they had to go to church in secret from everyone, and in the evenings destroy books with their father.

An exhibition in Moscow is Tsai's long-time dream

Cai Guoqiang considers the exhibition in Russia a gift for his anniversary - this year the artist turns 60 years old. Unlike many contemporary artists, Cai Guoqiang lives by pure art and does not relate himself to the market (he does not even have his own gallery). Despite the fact that his works cost a lot, for the sake of a big idea he is ready to make concessions - Cai Guoqiang worked for two years for free on an exhibition in Moscow.

Over the past three decades, art Cai Guoqiang- one of the most famous Chinese artists in the world, has been represented at almost all major international exhibitions, and listing all his awards would be too long. Suffice it to say that in 1999 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York he did a project dedicated to the anniversary of September 11, and in China he expanded the Great Wall of China by 10 km and was a special effects artist at the Olympics in Pekin. A stage designer by training, Cai Guoqiang carefully builds the dramaturgy of his works, and combines entertainment with Eastern philosophy.

Installation "Autumn"

Exhibition “Cai Guoqiang. October" at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin has been receiving numerous visitors for more than a month now - on the steps of the museum, each person entering is greeted by a gigantic installation “Autumn” - part of the exhibition, which the artist himself calls “a monument to collective utopia.” The birches planted in the summer during installation gradually turn yellow, and this is also part of the artist’s plan, who in his large-scale work expressed the course of history, the change of seasons, and the birth and death of all living things.

Cai Guoqiang during the installation of the installation. Photo: Raul Skrylev.

Alexandra Danilova, curator of the project “Cai Guoqiang. October”, for almost two years, at different stages of preparation for the exhibition, she worked with the artist and his team - during this time, Cai Guoqiang came to Russia three times, even before the opening. About why the project became significant for the museum and for the artist himself, how the creative process works in Tsai Guoqiang’s studio, and how Russian viewers enriched the artistic concept of Alexandra Danilova, the site’s observer, Elena Rubinova, spoke.

About the uniqueness of the project

Cai Guoqiang is an artist working in the genre of total installation, and of course, he thinks in categories familiar to contemporary art museums, in categories of global space, which required a certain flexibility from us, as a classical museum.

For Cai Guoqiang, the current project has also become significant, not only because this is his first exhibition in Russia. Collaboration with us in some way marked a new direction in Tsai’s creative activity, namely interaction with more classical museum institutions, and not just his usual museums of contemporary art. Immediately after us, he opens an exhibition at the Prado Museum, and there he will even be given the right to create his works in the genre of gunpowder painting right within the walls of the museum. He is currently preparing an exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery. It must be said that he already had an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there the main object was located on the roof, and the current exhibition and subsequent European institutions involve the use of museum space.

About the theatricality of the project

The fact is that Cai Guoqiang is a theater artist by training (he graduated from the Faculty of Scenography of the Shanghai Academy of Arts) and his exhibitions are performances that are performed in front of an audience and which should awaken a variety of feelings in the viewer.

A huge mountain made of cribs, strollers and cradles, blocking the entrance to the museum, is precisely that direct statement, filled with metaphorical meanings. The connection of a person with roots and history is personified by baby strollers and cribs, through which Russian birch trees rise upward. On the other hand, it was important for Tsai that these were objects that were not produced in a factory yesterday, but had already been used by people and had gone through a certain life cycle of the thing. In this sense, by the way, the museum also received a new experience from a crowdfunding campaign for collecting strollers and cribs. Each donated stroller or crib already has a certain history, an anthropomorphic dimension. And this was also important for the artist’s plan. History in general, in Tsai’s understanding, is a multi-component process, and the history of the twentieth century was made up of human lives, and each event has multiple associations and different experiences of a particular moment.

There are also some subtexts that the audience brings in and which the artist did not initially even think about. So, for example, the Russian audience reacted to this mountain unambiguously - stroller - step - Sergei Eisenstein« Battleship Potemkin. It is difficult to imagine what could be even more connected with the revolution among Russian viewers. Initially, Tsai somehow tried to fight this reading, but when he himself placed the most terrible stroller with a torn off wheel on top, I realized that he had come to terms with this metaphor and had even consciously tried to strengthen this association.

Installation of the installation at the entrance to the main building. Photo: Raul Skrylev.

Next, the viewer is greeted by the continuation of the installation - a luminous theatrical sky on white Chinese silk stretched over the stairs, and on it a line of the Internationale scorched with gunpowder in Russian - “no one will give us deliverance, not God, not the tsar and not the hero...”. At the end of the quote, Tsai puts an ellipsis, returning the viewer to the problem of the singular and the plural, the problem of memory - collective, which is always controversial, and personal.

Installation "People"

The object is composite, it was made in 2012

The concept of the exhibition is dedicated to Russian history and for the canvas “River of Life”, which “fits” one hundred years from 1917 to 2017, Tsai selects one hundred photographs taken in Russia and representing different fragments of Russian life. Moreover, it should be noted that there are almost no significant events, and mostly we see everyday photographs and people of various classes and nations. The viewer finds here recognizable archetypes that do not even have a strict time reference - a Caucasian family, street children, factory workers, students at their desks, soldiers in tunics, banners and a crowd on the street. Tsai turns to an experience that the viewer can perceive as personal; the general becomes part of life too. In the final part of the canvas “River of Life”, Tsai also places his portrait - a photograph of the 90s, when he was in Moscow as a tourist. This is a photograph of him in the Tretyakov Gallery against the background of his favorite painting by I. Kramskoy “The Stranger,” which he himself, an aspiring artist, copied a lot in his time, imitating the traditions of Russian art, which always meant a lot to him. And it is interesting that his current attitude to Russian art - a mature contemporary artist with a worldwide reputation - is still ambivalent: this approach combines vivid childhood memories and the sober professional view of the artist. So, having visited St. Petersburg and sharing his impressions with me, Tsai said that from the point of view of art, the most interesting artist for him is- Mikhail Vrubel. No less exciting, Tsai said, was for him to trace the influence of impressionism on the early Kustodiev, but at the same time he spent an entire hour in front of Aivazovsky’s “The Ninth Wave”, and the canonical Shishkin inspires no less admiration for him. For him, who grew up during the years of the cultural revolution in China, Russia, and before the USSR, was in many ways a kind of dream country. And this is also reflected in the works.

If Cai Guoqiang calls the installation in front of the museum entrance “a monument to collective utopia,” then the canvas “Garden of Dreams” is a garden of social utopia, and before- garden of ideologies. To one degree or another, everyone lives in the world of utopia, but the artist talks about the need to step aside so as not to fall into illusoryness. Talking with Tsai, I realized that he allows for another reading, in which the public and the personal, the general and the individual, intersect. Each of us also has a small garden, and this is also a human characteristic of living with dreams and ideals.

Cai Guoqiang is the only artist in the world who works using the gunpowder painting method. Gunpowder, as we know, was invented in Ancient China, but the Chinese perception of gunpowder does not coincide with the European one, in which it is associated mainly with weapons and death, whereas in China it is something joyful, and above all, fireworks, a holiday.

The process of creating gunpowder painting. Photo: Raul Skrylev.

About Cai Guoqiang's studio

About the fate of the exhibition

Material prepared by: Elena Rubinova

The material uses photographs by Raul Skrylev,

and the press service of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin.

About the uniqueness of the project

For the Pushkin Museum, this project turned out to be unique in many ways, but also because until now we have never worked under the commission system, which assumes that a project is commissioned from an artist exclusively for our museum. Of course, the project will be documented and preserved, but, according to the rules, even if the artist exhibits some of the works presented at the exhibition, he will always stipulate that it was created for the Pushkin Museum.

The second fundamental novelty of this exhibition was that until the last moment we worked with non-existent works - only 8 objects were brought from New York, including the exhibit “Earth” - part of the central installation in the White Hall of the museum. Everything else was created here in Moscow, and, in fact, until the very last days before the opening, no one fully understood what it would look like in the end. Cai Guoqiang is an artist working in the genre of total installation, and of course, he thinks in categories familiar to contemporary art museums, in categories of global space, which required a certain flexibility from us, as a classical museum.

And this exhibition is also very personal for Tsai. Although he does not openly state this, I got the impression that he dedicated it to his father, an artist and calligrapher who had a great influence on him, and the intimate part of the exhibition is traditional Chinese ink painting on small boxes on which he was once forced was written by his father.

About the theatricality of the project

The exhibition can be purely conditionally divided into segments, but rather it is one large work, starting at the main entrance, it seems to invade and continues inside the museum. Having worked a lot with this artist over the past year, and reflecting on his priorities, I realized that for him working with space is not so important as working with the viewer. The fact is that Cai Guoqiang is a theater artist by training (he graduated from the Faculty of Scenography of the Shanghai Academy of Arts) and his exhibitions are performances that are performed in front of an audience and which should awaken a variety of feelings in the viewer. A huge mountain made of cribs, strollers and cradles, blocking the entrance to the museum, is precisely that direct statement, filled with metaphorical meanings. The connection of a person with roots and history is personified by baby strollers and cribs, through which Russian birch trees rise upward. On the other hand, it was important for Tsai that these were objects that were not produced in a factory yesterday, but had already been used by people and had gone through a certain life cycle of the thing. In this sense, by the way, the museum also received a new experience from a crowdfunding campaign for collecting strollers and cribs. Each donated stroller or crib already has a certain history, an anthropomorphic dimension. And this was also important for the artist’s plan. History in general, in Tsai’s understanding, is a multi-component process, and the history of the 20th century was made up of human lives, and each event has multiple associations and different experiences of a particular moment.

There are also some subtexts that the audience brings in and which the artist did not initially even think about. So, for example, the Russian audience reacted to this mountain unambiguously - a stroller - a step - Sergei Eisenstein “Battleship Potemkin”. It is difficult to imagine what could be even more connected with the revolution among Russian viewers. Initially, Tsai somehow tried to fight this reading, but when he himself placed the most terrible stroller with a torn off wheel on top, I realized that he had come to terms with this metaphor and had even consciously tried to strengthen this association.

The Russian audience, especially older people, brought another interesting understanding that was not intended by the artist. They often say that they see the motif of a cemetery - fences, birch trees, and in fact they even continued the artist’s metaphor - life from birth to death, which ties in with one of the artist’s main themes in this exhibition - this is the theme “me and we”, the theme "man and history". Next, the viewer is greeted by the continuation of the installation - a luminous theatrical sky on white Chinese silk stretched over the stairs, and on it a line of the Internationale scorched with gunpowder in Russian - “no one will give us deliverance, not God, not the tsar and not the hero...”. At the end of the quote, Tsai puts an ellipsis, returning the viewer to the problem of the singular and the plural, the problem of memory - collective, which is always controversial, and personal.

About the field, the river of life and the garden of dreams

The exhibition reaches its climax in the White Hall, where the work is located, which the author called “The People”, deliberately, following the lines of the International, referring to communist terminology. The work consists of four parts - a field that symbolizes the Russian fertile land, a river of life, a dream garden and a soaring kite at the very end. The Earth object was the only object brought to Moscow, and we used sea transportation for the first time - the museum had never done this before. The object is composite, it was made in 2012 year for the series of works “Art for Aliens”, held in Los Angeles, and in this fertile field there were completely different signs, and on the ceiling. Here, on the field, images of a sickle and a hammer appeared, and this is best seen in the reflection on the mirrored ceiling-sky. But reflection, of course, is not quite the same as reality. The field itself is a rather unique object; it consists of 2 million blades of grass, each of them is dried and processed and a wire is inserted into each, and in the wooden panels there are 2 million holes into which the blade of grass is manually lowered. True, a cross-cultural difference crept in here, since in our understanding the golden field of a grain field is wheat or, in extreme cases, rye, but in the end it turned out that millet grows in the field. But as an image, especially from afar, it works. On the left is the canvas “River of Life”, and on the right is “Garden of Dreams”, one in Cai Guoqiang’s traditional black and white gunpowder painting, the other in color.

About real and fictional Russia

The concept of the exhibition is dedicated to Russian history and for the canvas “River of Life”, which “fits” one hundred years from 1917 to 2017, Tsai selects one hundred photographs taken in Russia and representing different fragments of Russian life. Moreover, it should be noted that there are almost no significant events, and mostly we see everyday photographs and people of various classes and nations. The viewer finds here recognizable archetypes that do not even have a strict time reference - a Caucasian family, street children, factory workers, students at their desks, soldiers in tunics, banners and a crowd on the street. Tsai turns to an experience that the viewer can perceive as personal; the general becomes part of life too. In the final part of the canvas “River of Life”, Tsai also places his portrait - a photograph of the 90s, when he was in Moscow as a tourist. This is a photograph of him in the Tretyakov Gallery against the background of his favorite painting by I. Kramskoy “The Stranger,” which he himself, an aspiring artist, copied a lot in his time, imitating the traditions of Russian art, which always meant a lot to him. And it is interesting that his current attitude to Russian art - a mature contemporary artist with a worldwide reputation - is still ambivalent: this approach combines vivid childhood memories and the sober professional view of the artist. So, having visited St. Petersburg and sharing his impressions with me, Tsai said that from the point of view of art, the most interesting artist for him is Mikhail Vrubel. No less exciting, Tsai said, was for him to trace the influence of impressionism on the early Kustodiev, but at the same time he spent an entire hour in front of Aivazovsky’s “The Ninth Wave”, and the canonical Shishkin inspires no less admiration for him. For him, who grew up during the years of the cultural revolution in China, Russia, and before the USSR, was in many ways a kind of dream country. And this is also reflected in the works.

If Cai Guoqiang calls the installation at the entrance to the museum “a monument to collective utopia,” then the painting “Garden of Dreams” is a garden of social utopia, and before that a garden of ideologies. To one degree or another, everyone lives in the world of utopia, but the artist talks about the need to step aside so as not to fall into illusoryness. Talking with Tsai, I realized that he allows for another reading, in which the public and the personal, the general and the individual, intersect. Each of us also has a small garden, and this is also a human characteristic of living with dreams and ideals.

About gunpowder calligraphy and gunpowder painting techniques

it is associated mainly with weapons and death, whereas in China it is something joyful, and above all fireworks, a holiday. For Tsai, gunpowder painting is a combination of traditional Chinese culture and contemporary art, to which this artist belongs.

Gunpowder painting is both very simple and very difficult at the same time. Part of the exhibition demonstrates how works are created using the gunpowder painting method. For the first time, Cai Guoqiang gives viewers the opportunity to look into the process of creating his works - we see gunpowder tests. Gunpowder behaves differently, and this is a necessary preparatory step. Tsai then makes preliminary drawings, from which stencils are cut out and placed on a primed canvas to create a figurative image. For complex posters, this is laser cutting. Then gunpowder is poured in, covered with non-flammable cloth or thick cardboard to limit the access of oxygen, a cord is laid inside and set on fire. The main technology is to prevent open fire. Creating even large-scale works takes seconds, but the author himself does not fully know what will happen. While creating the painting, we had volunteers stand one meter apart with wet towels in case of fire. As the artist wrote in one of his articles, the main thing is not to light it, but to put it out in time.

About Cai Guoqiang's studio

Cai Guoqiang's team and studio function like one big family, from dining together at a large table (Tsai even has a chef) to such gestures as inviting and paying for the studio's relatives of the curator to come to the opening of the exhibition in Moscow. The relationships between Tsai's team members are very human, despite the fact that sometimes everyone gets frustrated with the 24-hour work schedule and understands that Tsai is an artist of incredible efficiency. And without the understanding and support of the team, much would have been impossible.

About the fate of the exhibition

Although the exhibition was created for the museum and at our request, all exhibits are considered the property of the studio and will go back to New York. But we hope that perhaps some of what was created will remain in Moscow and, of course, we started talking about the fact that after the end of the exhibition we would be happy to accept some of Tsai’s works into the museum’s collection,but the decision to donate anything is made not by the artist himself, but by the entire studio team.

This year, we are all, willingly or unwillingly, trying to comprehend the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and the hundred years that our country lived after this colossal break in its history. Just as it is impossible to imagine art that exists without a historical context, it is also impossible not to reflect such a date in the artistic life of Russia, provoking reflection on the event itself, its consequences for the country and the whole world, and the results of the past hundred years. Many museums, galleries and other art institutions presented their projects dedicated to the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Tomorrow at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, perhaps the most provocative, but, without a doubt, the most striking exhibition related to this topic opens - “October” by the famous Chinese artist and pyrotechnician Cai Guoqiang.

Why did one of the main museums of our country turn to a modern author with such a topic, albeit an eminent one, repeatedly awarded, in demand in the world's leading museums, but still a foreigner? Such questions are quite understandable, but they disappear when you see what this author brought to Moscow and how he showed us our history from the outside - as if he lived it with us.

October of one boy

Cai Guoqiang was born in 1957 in China into the family of a historian and artist. In his childhood, he had the opportunity to see an era of great changes in China and feel the consequences of the Russian revolution in his country, so the theme of childhood and the theme of the coup remained a single memory for him.

The artist’s worldview and his formation as an author were greatly influenced by Russian art, with which he was familiar since childhood thanks to China’s close ties with the Soviet Union. The master has retained his admiration and respect for the paintings of Levitan, Kramskoy, Malevich, Plastov, Moiseenko, and Laktionov to this day. In his essay “One Boy's October,” Cai Guoqiang writes:

“How incomprehensible Russian culture seemed to us, the Chinese, then! So vast that for us it was the true expression of a foreign culture, the true expression of the West for the East.<…>And although after the deterioration of relations between the USSR and China, the word “Russia” suddenly disappeared from the cultural life of the Chinese people, Russian culture remained a strong foundation that fed the minds of “cultured youth.”

Konstantin Maksimov. Portrait of a Chinese sailor. 1956. Oil on canvas.

Cai Guoqiang was almost in awe of his teacher at the Shanghai Theater Academy, Zhou Benyi, who at one time studied at the Repin Academy of Arts in Leningrad. And the story of the Russian painter Konstantin Maksimov, who visited China in 1955-1957, especially affected the master’s preferences. The Soviet artist not only taught the best Chinese students the techniques of oil painting, but also seriously influenced several generations of masters of the Celestial Empire, including Cai Guoqiang, who subsequently collected an impressive collection of Maximov’s works and recently fulfilled his dream of visiting the artist’s grave in Russia. Mr. Tsai brought several paintings by Maksimov and matchboxes with his father’s drawings to an exhibition in Moscow.

Cai Ruiqin. Drawings on matchboxes. Matchboxes, pen, ink.

Smell the gunpowder

The study of stage design led Cai Guoqiang to turn to various media technologies, installation, video, performance and a new technique for the art world - gunpowder painting. Living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, the master began to use this original Chinese material in an unexpected way - in creating his pyrotechnic installations.

The exhibition at the Pushkin Museum shows several large-scale panels made by the artist using monochrome or tinted gunpowder, as well as details of the preparatory work for these amazing works. The author conceived them specifically for the Moscow project and made them in the presence of the public in one of the VDNKh pavilions, officially provided for this event. The process of creation itself impresses with its beauty and power, when the artist explodes a carefully prepared structure on canvas or silk, and before the eyes of the audience a unique and largely unpredictable composition is born, which has no analogues in its strength and expressiveness. Watching the birth of a new masterpiece, you never tire of admiring the genius of the master, who retained in adulthood his childish delight in the beauty of the world and passion for his spontaneous and dangerous art. Cai Guoqiang calls himself a big child and considers a positive and joyful outlook on life to be the main driving force of his creativity.

The main exhibit of the exhibition in the White Hall of the museum is a single composition of several elements, filled with allegories and meanings. The center of the hall is occupied by a twenty-meter installation “Earth” made of ears of grain, on which a pattern in the form of a sickle and hammer is applied, reflected in the same huge mirror suspended from the ceiling.

Earth. 2017. Plywood, plants, polymer mirror film.

On the left wall stretches the gunpowder composition “River” - a winding stream of images melting in the glow of explosions and shocks. The narrative begins as if from negatives of old pre-revolutionary photographs, when life was calm and measured. Further, the rhythm and intensity of the explosions becomes more frequent, the images become blurred and lost in the gunpowder smoke. Collectivization and industrialization were followed by an almost hopelessly dark period - the Great Patriotic War. Continuing further, the river of time flows into today, in the light of which one can discern a selfie of Cai Guoqiang himself in the Tretyakov Gallery against the backdrop of the work of Kramskoy, so revered by him.

River. 2017. Canvas, gunpowder.

Life lives

Tongues of flame, fast lines drawn by explosions, and images of people melting in a flickering dark mass excite the imagination, evoke countless associations and emotions, as complex and multifaceted as the history of our country in the 20th century. Here, the innovative technique of the Chinese author perfectly reflects both the tragedy of the century and the depth of the people’s experience of the catastrophes and upheavals that they had to face. However, perhaps due to his slightly outsider view, perhaps in the traditions of Chinese philosophy, which is very close to the artist, with all the diversity and depth of emotions, he managed to maintain a surprisingly peaceful and bright mood of the work. Towards the end of the “river” the inscription in Russian “There is no death” is clearly readable. In the context of this composition, and the general theme of the exhibition, this phrase amazes with its Christian transcendence and unearthly peace. Perhaps it is peace - as the culmination and resolution of all shocks - that is actually the main theme of this exhibition.

River. 2017. Canvas, gunpowder. Fragment.

On the right wall of the hall there is a twenty-meter composition “Garden”, in which, against the background of flowering plants and multi-colored flashes, images of children, old Soviet postcards, and everything that, like flowers through asphalt, sprout in the most difficult and difficult years appear. Children played in the ashes, trees bloomed every spring, people loved each other and their long-suffering homeland. Explosions of color, in some places completely transparent, gentle, in others thick and intense, as if they make up this elusive matter of memory, with which this amazing canvas is written. According to the artist, the image of the garden also symbolizes the rosy hopes with which people sometimes greeted the revolution and which melted away in cruel reality.

Garden. 2017. Canvas, gunpowder. Fragment.

The central composition “Earth” in such proximity sounds especially piercing and tragically submissive. The ears of corn crushed by the sickle and hammer represent the Russian people, who endured all the disasters of the 20th century, and the huge mirror, like an endless sky, reflected its suffering and labor from the heights of times.

Compositions “Earth” and “Garden”.

The final touch to the picture of the century is given by a kite fluttering in the distance, in which it is easy to see a subtle allusion to the image of the artist, and through him, each person with his individuality and spiritual aspirations. And here the association with the gospel lines “The Spirit blows where it will” comes to mind. Among tragedies and wars, beauty, love and the artist’s revitalizing inspiration are born.

On the colonnade, a large screen displays a computer-generated model of the large fireworks display planned by Cai Guoqiang on Red Square to commemorate the revolution. For a number of reasons, this pyrotechnic display did not take place, but it will be shown as a film at the exhibition. To the music of “October” by P.I. Tchaikovsky we will see piercing and deeply touching images created with the help of colored fireworks. Exploring the expressiveness of new technologies for art, the Chinese master created surprisingly emotionally rich and expressive art, ephemeral as smoke, but powerful as gunpowder.

Autumn. 2017. Strollers. Cribs, birch trees.

The last two weeks before the opening of the exhibition, serious debates have been raging on social networks, because the facade of Pushkinsky gradually drowned in the large-scale installation “Autumn”. Indeed, the slender portico is almost completely covered by a 15-meter mountain of Soviet cradles and strollers, in which hundreds of young birch trees were placed. And this forest rustles quietly, turns yellow and will slowly fly around throughout the two months of the exhibition.

The first impression of this composition is some kind of unaccountable childish happiness, vaguely exciting the soul with its elusiveness, vagueness and nostalgia for carefree and joyful years. And I immediately thought of a quote from the scientific works of one of the first Russian gardeners of the 18th century, A.T. Bolotov, - “raising young apple trees.” (The Pushkin Museum has been “raising young birch trees” for two years, and after the exhibition they will be planted in a place already allocated for them.) Touching and thin trees, so tenderly placed in their beds, are collected into a young, but very majestic forest on the mountainside.

And this is the main metaphor contained in Cai Guoqiang’s idea: life always triumphs, new life sprouts from childhood memories, continuing the eternal process of earth renewal with its vital force. And our memories go further and further, acquiring new shoots of other people's stories. And in this irreversibility and inevitability of life, with its joys and sorrows, hopes and disasters, there is amazing strength and pacifying peace. I am happy that we have the opportunity to touch this healing art and, perhaps, find in it answers to the questions of our history and our lives.

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about the author

Art critic, specialist in Byzantine painting, curator of exhibition projects, founder of his own gallery of contemporary art. Most of all I love talking and listening about art. I am married and have two cats. https://www.instagram.com/olga_poluektova_art/

CHINESE TOURIST ABOUT THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
In the park in front of the famous portico of the Tsvetaevsky Museum there is a small copy of the cemetery in Menton (Côte d'Azur). To those who have not been there, I inform you: this is a rock above the sea, which became a cemetery for Russian revolutionary emigration: famous noble families. The installation-mountain consists of the skeletons of children's cribs, imitating cemetery fences, through which Russian birch trees grow. Before it completely dries out, you need to visit the exhibition!

This impressively sized metaphor is complemented by a second installation, skillfully inscribed in the volume of the famous White Hall of the museum. They are connected by a canopy banner made of the finest white silk above the main staircase with a line from the “Internationale”: NO ONE WILL GIVE US DELIVERANCE: NEITHER GOD, NOT THE KING AND NOT THE HERO. The floor of the White Hall is a gigantic carpet of vertically standing, literally, like in a field, trimmed stalks of some withered grass. Each blade of grass is inserted into a personal hole in a sheet of plywood that covers the floor. There are MILLIONS of these stems. This is EARTH (as it is written on the wall). Two gigantic “sickles-and-hammers” framed by five-pointed stars are “woven” on the grass carpet. Moreover, they are woven in such a way that in the giant hanging mirror that forms the ceiling of the hall, this carpet is reflected exactly like a mirror: what looks in the mirror reflection on the ceiling as convex, relief, on the “Earth”, in fact. is “convex” - this is a metaphor for how we see today the events of a century ago. There are other metaphors: a series of events in a hundred-year history are represented by a black and white stream of archival negatives and positives - this is the “River”, and on the opposite wall is the colored “Garden” of dreams and hopes.
Finally, in the nave of the White Hall there is a white kite floating in the air flow, gathering all the streams of metaphors of this exhibition into one point in the Epilogue. But it turns out that this is not a dot, an ellipsis...

As you understand, everything is simple.
And it is contemplated to the sounds of shots/explosions, dissonant with “October” from THE SEASONS of P.I. Tchaikovsky

AND
the main thing: the AUTHOR, his immortal “I” of the artist, which alone deserves eternal life in art - about this are video narrations on plasma panels and video projections + Red Square + the Kremlin and fireworks - these images are understandable to us, albeit with a Chinese accent. To the credit of the author, he still preferred artistic language to the sociological and political abstractions that are almost inevitable in such a topic.

In conclusion, I can say that I looked at all this with sincere interest, and I did not have any internal protest. But when I then walked through the suite of old Dutch-German paintings, I realized that I had never before experienced such intense pleasure from it

And yet, “CAI GUOCIANG. OCTOBER" is the most significant statement made this year in Moscow about the Russian Revolution of 1917

The Pushkin Museum is opening a project by the Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang, famous for his experiments with gunpowder, for whom the museum has been collecting strollers all summer. Director Marina Loshak told Forbes Life about the exhibitions of Cai Guoqiang and Chaim Soutine, how the museum’s budget is structured, where the museum gets funds for million-dollar exhibitions, and why it is so interested in the law on patronage.

A huge installation in front of the museum entrance, created by one of the most famous contemporary artists, Cai Guoqiang, is the main event of the October exhibition. The gigantic structure is a mountain of baby strollers and cradles from which birch trees grow. This project is an understanding of the 1917 revolution and is being prepared together with a very important partner for us - Sberbank, with which the exhibition “Seeing the Invisible” has already been realized.

In mid-October we will show graphics by the largest representatives of Austrian art of the early 20th century - Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

Then a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Chaim Soutine will open. More than 50 works by the artist will be shown in the historical context of paintings by old masters who influenced his formation, and modern authors who were inspired by the work of Soutine himself. Works for the exhibition will be provided by the largest museums in France (the Pompidou Center, the Orangerie Museum, the Paris Museum of Modern Art) and private collectors from Europe and Russia.

Another of the landmark projects of the fall is an exhibition, which is being prepared by Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova, related to the art of the Impressionists.

We dream of making an exhibition together with the National Museum of Damascus, which has a unique collection of ancient art, and my employees flew to Syria to study the exhibits at the height of hostilities.

- What is the annual budget of the Pushkin Museum and how is it formed?

Last year, our museum’s budget amounted to about 1 billion rubles. Moreover, I can proudly say that we have entered an amazing phase of existence, when only half of the budget is state subsidies, and the rest is funds that we ourselves earn or attract.

Sponsorship funds and donations amount to no more than 15%; the museum mainly earns money on its own: from entrance tickets, a store, lectures, educational programs, etc.

But we have something to strive for. For example, in the USA almost all museums are funded by individuals or companies. The main income of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, approximately 60-70% of the budget, comes from the endowment fund (one of the largest in the United States, $2.7 billion) and in the form of donations. The remaining funds come from ticket sales and the museum store. By the way, their guardianship system is very well thought out. So, if you donate $60 a year, you get a 10% discount in the museum store, it is one of the best in the world, for $550 - the right to attend dance parties in the gallery for free, for $4000 a year - free breakfast before visiting the museum, for $8 thousand . per year - attend concerts, for $20,000 - access to receptions by the president of the museum. And such concerts and receptions bring the museum about $20-30 million. Naturally, the museum is given not only money, but also paintings. The largest gift is from the billionaire and one of the heirs of the Estée Lauder empire, Leonard Lauder. He gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art 78 paintings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, worth more than $1 billion.

Last year, MoMA, another major New York museum, had $70 million in revenue from its funds, including its endowment, $30 million from visits, and $50 million from stores and restaurants.

Exhibitions of such a level as the recent “Venice of the Renaissance” with paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, or the upcoming Soutine exhibition are approaching €1 million in cost, where does the museum get such funds?

As a rule, we organize exchange exhibitions, which significantly reduces the cost of the entire process. But, despite this, large exhibitions really cost no less than €1 million. And they are funded by patrons.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Turner were sponsored by the Art, Science and Sports Foundation of Alisher Usmanov, and viewers saw the unique paintings of the Cranachs thanks to the financial support of VTB, the bank that is the general sponsor of the museum. Piranesi and some other traditional Italian exhibitions are supported by UniCreditBank. Such thematic cooperation is a fairly common story. The collection of impressionists and post-impressionists, for example, is supported by Rosbank, as an official partner of the Art Gallery.

It doesn’t surprise me that they willingly give money to exhibitions; it’s prestigious. Another thing is striking: our patrons are gradually turning into philanthropists. They provide funds for educational programs and social projects, and while doing this, they insist on anonymity. These people are not motivated by laws, tax cuts, or fame. In general, nothing except internal, personal responsibility to society, and this is the absolute trend of today.

What sources does the Pushkin Museum have for replenishing its collection? For example, there is virtually no Western contemporary art in the museum.

We hope that contemporary art will become an important part of our museum, and that the building of the new museum will appear not in the museum quarter, but somewhere in the city. We plan to assemble an expert council, which will include representatives of international museums, which will develop a concept for the collection of contemporary art at the Pushkin Museum, and only then we will look for funds. Considering the prices for contemporary art, we rely only on outside money. I would like to show many: Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Sidney Sherman, Marina Abramovich, Christian Boltanski.

The world practice of creating museum collections is diverse, each has its own path. Plus, I believe in luck, and I hope that working on our reputation in the field of contemporary art will lead to people starting to give us gifts. It is difficult to rely only on the generosity of fellow citizens, but we will do everything possible to ensure that they want to give to the Pushkin Museum.

In addition, when large-scale construction and reconstruction are completed by 2024, a museum quarter will appear and there will also be space for modern sculpture. Our museum landscape will include works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Emile Antoine Bourdelle and other important sculptors. We will rent these works for a period of five to seven years, and then replace them.

In addition, the museum plans to provide space for temporary storage of private collections. In addition, I believe that soon there will be a law on patronage of the arts, which will significantly ease the situation of museums.

For example, the entire American museum system is built on gifts from collectors. But they have a completely different tax system, and donors are motivated.