Exhibition October of a Chinese artist. Project "Cai Guoqiang"

MOSCOW, September 12 – RIA Novosti. The main exhibition areas of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) turned into a gigantic installation reflecting the centenary of the revolution in Russia, as part of an exhibition by Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang, the vernissage of which took place on Monday.

Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang lived in Japan for a long time and now works in the USA. Most often he creates using the technique of gunpowder painting, and also performs large-scale gunpowder shows. He specially came to Moscow long before the opening of the exhibition in order, together with numerous volunteers, to create unique paintings for the October exhibition.

Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang during the preview of the exhibition "Cai Guoqiang. October" at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A. Pushkin, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the 1917 revolution in Russia. September 11, 2017

Emotional exhibition

Cai Guoqiang is presenting his works in Russia for the first time, so, as always, he approached the matter on a grand scale. Not only the main squares of the Pushkin Museum became a space for his works: a large-scale installation called “Autumn” in the courtyard completely hid the main building from the eyes of visitors.

This huge structure consists of hundreds of children's cradles and strollers, inside of which real birch trees grow in tubs. Now their leaves have already turned yellow. Subject to nature, they will continue to change, and this is the author’s intention.

“The cradle is the place where our first naive dreams are born. The installation “Autumn” is a monument to man’s dreams of a better life and a mausoleum of social utopias,” they say at Pushkinsky.

At the opening day in the Italian courtyard of the museum, guests were greeted by the special representative of the Russian President for international cultural cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoy, museum director Marina Loshak and Tsai Guoqiang himself.

“We dreamed for two years about what we would be able to do on the theme of the revolution. When we were thinking about what we could say on the theme of this important date, we decided that the most modern living artists should talk about it. Having seen and learned everything “What Tsai did, we realized that it was with him that we should enter this river,” Loshak said.

According to her, the work done by everyone involved in the exhibition was very difficult, but incredibly interesting. “We did what we wanted. We made a very emotional, very strict exhibition that will make you all feel something. I hope that we will amaze you,” the museum director emphasized.

Shvydkoy admitted that he envies those who have not yet seen the exhibition, since it brought him great pleasure, which he would like to experience again.

“This exhibition is a tribute to great respect for a great tragedy that brought great beauty. This is a wonderful museum project that demonstrates that Russians and Chinese can understand each other in some fundamental values by which we live,” Shvydkoy said. He emphasized that the "October" exposition will become an important stage in the cultural relations of the two peoples.

Dedication to Russia

Cai Guoqiang is actually connected with Russia not only by his long and very fruitful work on the “October” exhibition. He admitted that from a young age he was inspired by the work of Russian artists, in particular, Isaac Levitan and Ivan Kramskoy.

“I grew up in a distant province, but I was influenced by Russian art and culture. And I especially diligently copied the painting “Unknown” by Kramskoy, and gave the best copy to my wife’s brother... I remember in my youth we really wanted to imitate Russian artists, tried to recreate them paintings,” Guoqiang said. By the way, his wife was also present at the opening day. With touching memories of her youth, she could not hold back her tears.

The exhibition consists of twenty-meter canvases in three techniques of gunpowder painting - color, black and white and calligraphy. The central part of the exhibition is a three-part installation under the general title “The People”. The center of the composition - “Earth”, symbolizing a fertile field - is a huge field of ears of corn, in the center of which Soviet symbols are carved: a sickle, a hammer and stars. You can see them especially well in the mirror on the ceiling. On two sides there are gunpowder paintings: black and white “River” and bright “Garden”.

A formidable weapon as a means to express love, show the beauty of the world and create works of art. Who would have thought that gunpowder could be used for such purposes? Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang will show the Moscow public how to paint with ashes, how to make an explosion peaceful and prove that a child’s tear outweighs all historical cataclysms.

The White Hall of the Pushkin Museum as you have never seen it before. Underfoot is a symbol of the era. Overhead is a reflection of the era. In some places the spikelet was trampled down, in others they were straightened. Those who are mounting the exhibition already have dazzle in their eyes. And the one who invented it is full of enthusiasm.

This is how Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang looked at the Soviet hammer and sickle from what seems like an infinite number of angles. Inspired by the revolution of 1917, he brought an exhibition to Moscow. I sowed the hall of the Pushkin Museum with millet. And he staged several explosions in one of the VDNH pavilions.

Several dozen spectators and assistants. Well, Cai Guoqiang can’t create in a small workshop. Calls himself a master of gunpowder painting. Explosion. The canvas is covered with ash. There is a stencil under the ashes, which means the design will appear only where it is needed.

I will give a sign when to start extinguishing; there is no need to approach areas that are not affected by the explosion.

Born in China. Lived in Japan. Currently working in New York. Once he preferred air to canvas, and gunpowder to paints. His pyrotechnic shows are like Impressionist paintings bursting out of museum frames.

The canvas “River” is also a gunpowder technique. Stencils - 100 photographs with the main events of the century. Mixed into one large portrait of the era: the faces of the soldiers at the front and the eyes of the builders of a bright future. But we still need to find them here. Think about the meaning and look for images.

“This is about human life, individual life is very important. Like Dostoevsky, a child’s tear outweighs all historical shocks,” says the director of the State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkina Marina Loshak.

A painting within a painting. Here Tsai hid Kramskoy’s “Portrait of a Stranger.” He loves Russian artists. He admits that in the Tretyakov Gallery he cries with delight. And he takes photographs all the time.

“On the eve of the exhibition, I decided to look at the painting again in the Tretyakov Gallery. I was surprised when I saw that someone was copying it and decided to take a selfie in front of the background. And yesterday, when I painted my painting “The River,” I decided to put it at the end of the river in order to combine the history of my personal life with the history of Russia,” said Cai Guoqiang.

Tsai is putting on an exhibition about the revolution, and at the same time creating her own. In space. The cold classicism of the building of the Pushkin Museum also exploded with its objects. Not only inside, but also outside.

Classical art hid behind modern art. This is what the entrance to the museum looks like now: dozens and dozens of cribs and strollers. Birch trees seem to grow from them. There are so many symbols of new life at once. With this huge installation, Pushkinsky shows that he is ready to let the wind of change into his windows.

“We live in a temple, but the temple definitely needs to be ventilated. And, of course, there must be the living air of today’s life, and of course based on the best examples,” says the director of the State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkina Marina Loshak.

The hidden facade and the now closed courtyard, where people used to line up to get into the museum, are discussed in Moscow no less than the future exhibition. Some people understand, some don't. A common thing for a modern artist.

“There was Rembrandt and Goya. When they appeared, they also raised many questions among their contemporaries. And here the question is that the artist is ahead of his time, feeling it very subtly,” says exhibition curator Alexandra Danilova.

Some condemn, others help the master create. Muscovites brought old strollers and cribs here. The artist considers those who once rocked these cradles and those who once slept in them to be his main co-authors.

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 recall 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.

Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang with an exhibition reflecting on the Russian Revolution

In the year of the centenary of the October Revolution, the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin went on an experiment. He invited a contemporary artist to create a large-scale exhibition-reflection on the most important date in Russian history. We are talking about Cai Guoqiang, a Chinese artist famous for his experiments with gunpowder. The exhibition was called "October".

Philosophy of gunpowder

Cai Guoqiang is an artist who studied stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy and has worked in a variety of art forms, from graphics to performance art. He began using gunpowder in his work after moving to Japan in 1986. Since then, it has been his main artistic instrument, and at the same time, a material that is significant for Chinese culture.

“In my home province there are many enterprises that produce pyrotechnics. I experimented with this material even before moving to Japan. In addition to it, I also used just fire. But gunpowder is unpredictable, I felt a certain freedom, challenge and struggle in it. In this unpredictability something new is born,” says Cai Guoqiang.

Cai Guoqiang in front of his “gunpowder” work

His first widely known “powder” works were “Projects for Aliens.” This is a series of installations, each of which, as Cai Guoqiang dreamed, could be seen from space. So, in 1993, he “expanded” the Great Wall of China by 10 thousand meters towards the Gobi Desert. A wall of fire illuminated the dunes for 15 minutes.

Fragment of the "Great Wall of China" made by the artist

Cai Guoqiang became the first person with a Chinese passport to visit the US government's nuclear test site in Nevada. This was in 1996, when he was working on A Century with Mushroom Clouds: A Project for the 20th Century. In a photograph from that time, the artist stands on a deserted ridge at the test site, and a cloud of smoke in the shape of a “nuclear mushroom” spreads above him.

Cai Guoqiang has repeatedly talked about nuclear disasters through his works. In Hiroshima, he created the installation “There is a black hole in the Earth too.” Hundreds of balloons filled with helium sent gunpowder into the sky, forming a spiral. Flashing, it began to descend, disappearing into the “black hole”.
“Gunpowder is a very suitable tool for revealing the invisible part of the world in our minds. I create on the edge,” says Cai Guoqiang.
Another popular work by the artist, the half-kilometer-long Stairway to Heaven, illuminated Quanzhou in 2015. Cai Guoqiang dedicated the installation to his grandmother. When he was little, a woman sold seafood to help him become an artist.
"Everything I do, I do through the lens of a boy who will never grow up. An eternal child. He loves to dream and is in constant play. I have so many fans around the world because I depict the childhood of each of us," - says the artist.
Cai Guoqiang's works have received various awards: he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, awards from the largest museums in the world, and also became a laureate of the Imperial Prize for achievements in the field of art. In 2008, he was appointed director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

Fireworks project for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony

Cai Guoqiang calls himself a nomad: he creates installations all over the world, working with the culture of each country. His personal exhibitions were held in major museums in the world, for example, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Installation by the artist shown as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney

On the influence of Russian culture

Cai Guoqiang has a special attitude towards Russian culture. According to him, she had a great influence on him in childhood.
“I was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, a time of close friendship between China and the USSR. Many Chinese in those years could not write a word in English, but spoke Russian. When I studied painting, we imitated Russian artists. My teacher was a graduate of the Repin Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg,” says Cai Guoqiang.
He tells how he made copies of “The Unknown” by Ivan Kramskoy, studying low-quality reproductions in magazines, and how he walked through dozens of village ponds in search of a place similar to the painting “At the Pool” by Isaac Levitan. But Cai Guoqiang especially singles out Konstantin Maximov. The Soviet artist, a representative of socialist realism, taught the art of oil painting in China for two years - from 1955 to 1957. He made a great contribution to the development of fine arts in the country.

"Portrait of a Chinese Sailor" and "Qi Baishi at work" by Konstantin Maximov

“Konstantin Maksimov is not so well known in his homeland, but in my country he became the founder of his own school. Although it does not formally exist, this tradition is still preserved. You can trace his influence on my early paintings. In later times, I collected more than two hundred his works and organized three exhibitions in the largest cities of China,” continues the artist.

Sunset on the Shore, painted by Cai Guoqiang in the 1970s

According to Cai Guoqiang, he dreamed of an exhibition in Russia since childhood. "October" is his first project presented in our country. All works of art were created specifically for the exhibition, and he “collected” them on site, in the museum and at additional sites.

"October"

The installation "Autumn" is the first thing a visitor to the exhibition sees. It is located at the entrance to the museum. This is a metaphorical mountain, the basis of which is cribs and strollers. Dozens of young birches sprout from them. The museum grew trees in a nursery specifically for the exhibition.
Moscow residents donated cribs and strollers to the museum. Cai Guoqiang often involves ordinary people in creating his works. “These baby carriages symbolize dreams, childhood, socialist utopia in the hearts of people,” says the artist.

Installation "Autumn"

Above the main staircase of the museum, Cai Guoqiang stretched out a silk canvas on which a quote from the Internationale was written in gunpowder: “No one will give us deliverance: neither god, nor king, nor hero.” The work was called "Sound". Next is the installation "Earth", which was created from dry plants. Soviet symbols are hidden among the ears of corn, but they are reflected in the mirror surface above them.

"Sound"

“Earth” symbolizes the Russian field; the artist wanted to recreate the feeling of mystery that arose in his childhood when watching Soviet films. He talks about romantic ideas - freedom and beauty of life, which he himself experienced in his youth.
At the same time, "Earth" is located between two canvases - "River" and "Garden". They were created with the help of volunteers in the artist's traditional "gunpowder" style. The black and white "River" symbolizes the flow of bygone memories.

How the work "River" was created in pavilion 22 at VDNKh

The powder composition "Garden" is made in color. Red poppies and carnations are placed next to Soviet propaganda posters. They embody the ideals of the past. All this, including the visitors to the hall, is reflected in the mirror surface above the “Earth”.

"Garden"

The culmination of the exhibition is the video project "October. Daytime fireworks on Red Square": in the sky above the main square of the country, lights explode one after another to the music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The performance ends with 100 seconds of volleys. They leave behind a huge white cloud that is slowly carried away by the wind.

Video project "October. Daytime fireworks on Red Square"

The exhibition will run from September 13 to November 12 in the Main Building of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin. The general sponsor of the exhibition is PJSC Sberbank.

Worked on the project:

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