Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe is the most comprehensive survey to date of work by the innovative artist Cai Guo-Qiang (surname pronounced tsai, given name pronounced gwo chang) and represents the Guggenheim Museum’s first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist. Installed as a spectacular site-specific presentation within the museum’s galleries, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda building, the exhibition presents a chronological and thematic survey that charts the artist’s creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four categories:

• gunpowder drawings;
• explosion events, which are documented by videos, photographs, and related drawings;
• installations, including Inopportune: Stage One (2004) with its nine cars filling the void of the rotunda’s central space; and
• social projects, which are documented by photographs.

Featuring over 80 works from the 1980s to the present—selected from major public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia—the exhibition illuminates Cai’s significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism.

Cai is internationally recognized as an artist and curator and has been active in exhibitions, biennales, and public celebrations around the world for the last 20 years. Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, and a resident of New York since 1995, Cai is acclaimed as a bold originator of new forms of art that use gunpowder to create large-scale drawings and site-specific explosion events. Since the mid-1990s his practice has expanded to include interactive installations that often incorporate traditional signs and symbols of Chinese culture used to construct original ideas and meanings. Cai’s methodology incorporates aspects of conceptual art, performance, and Land art, but extends each of those practices in new directions.

Responding to commissions across the globe, Cai’s work sometimes requires collaboration with tens or even hundreds of workers, including his project team, art-world volunteers, and local laborers. Relying on his experience growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, he explores the relationship between the individual and the collective society. As a direct development of this practice, Cai has recently produced what are referred to as “social projects,” which include a series of museums in remote, nonart sites like military bunkers, where he assumes the role of curator and invites the participation of artists and the local public alike. Cai’s use of these spaces in local communities involves extraordinary logistical negotiations, relies on the artist’s considerable charisma and mobilization skills, and is infused with an idealism that aspires to claim the public realm as a site for democratic art and power. He is currently a core member of the creative team that is planning the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games—ceremonies that are designed as art spectacles of unprecedented mass outreach and will reach an estimated four billion television viewers.

The Guggenheim’s retrospective exhibition is a site-specific installation that Cai has designed to “fill the museum with the power of an explosion.” The exhibition focuses on the development and expression of his signature innovation—the harnessing of gunpowder to create powerful explosions, both as gunpowder drawings on canvas or paper and as explosion events.

The exhibition’s subtitle, I Want to Believe, refers to an ongoing aspect of Cai’s work. “For Cai, art is the experience of believing in something that is unseen, or rather, exists beyond belief,” remarks curator Alexandra Munroe. His work freely cites historic tales, folk myths, extraterrestrials, UFOs, nuclear apocalypse, medicinal powers, the big bang, and other topics.

This exhibition is made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, which promotes the understanding of Chinese arts and culture worldwide.

The exhibition is organized by Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, in close collaboration with the artist. Assistant curators Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and Sandhini Poddar have provided additional support. Following its New York opening, the exhibition is expected to travel to Beijing to coincide with the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, and to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in spring 2009.

The Sackler Center for Arts Education is a gift of the Mortimer D. Sackler Family.

Educational activities are made possible by The Edith and Frances Mulhall Achilles Memorial Fund, The Engelberg Foundation, William Randolph Hearst Foundation, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, Esther Simon Charitable Trust, and the museum's Education Committee.

This educator’s guide is adapted from Thomas Krens and Alexandra Munroe, Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008).

All works by Cai Guo-Qiang © 2008 Cai Guo-Qiang. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

I Want to Believe ™ is used with permission of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

“My father is a calligrapher; he makes traditional paintings, and he also studies Chinese history. My home was always full of traditional artists and a love for traditional Chinese art. . . . I wanted to follow the Western tradition of oil painting and sculpture and be influenced by Western thought. Now, looking back, I see I’ve inherited some of my father’s scholarly thinking; Chinese cultural tradition is part of me.”

Cai Guo-Qiang (surname pronounced tsai, given name pronounced gwo chang) was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China. Even as a child he was interested in art and would sketch landscapes around his house in watercolor, and later in oil paint. Cai was part of a theater troupe as a teenager and also appeared in two martial arts films. At the age of 24 he entered the Shanghai Drama Institute to formally study stage design and related disciplines including architectural drawing, lighting, and costume design. During the summers he and his future wife Hong Hong Wu would travel to the far corners of China to experience nature and primal memories of the land. His experiences were reflected in works that incorporated rubbings of natural objects such as rocks and tree roots.

From early on his work has combined both scholarly and politically charged aspects. Proficient in a variety of mediums, Cai began using gunpowder in his work to foster spontaneity and confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China at the time. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995 Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an exploration that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature explosion events. These explosion projects, both poetic and ambitious, aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them.

Cai achieved international prominence during his time in Japan and his work began to be shown around the world. In 1995 he moved to New York, where he currently resides. His work reflects his cultural history and draws on a wide variety of sources including feng shui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, computers, vending machines, and gunpowder. Since 9/11 he has reflected upon his use of explosives both as metaphor and material. “Why is it important,” he asks, “to make these violent explosions beautiful? Because the artist, like an alchemist, has the ability to transform certain energies, using poison against poison, using dirt and getting gold.”

The Guggenheim has a special history with Cai. In 1996 he was selected as a finalist for the inaugural Hugo Boss Prize, which is administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and awarded to extraordinary creative figures in contemporary international art. His participation in the Guggenheim’s accompanying exhibition was a catalyst for Cai’s international recognition, and the work he presented, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan (1996), is among the highlights of the Guggenheim Museum’s contemporary art collection.

Through years of artistic practice, Cai has formulated collaborative relationships with specialists and experts from various disciplines, including scientists, doctors, feng shui masters, designers, architects, choreographers, filmmakers, and composers. Many who have worked with him on projects have reflected upon how profoundly meaningful the experience has been to them. Cai is once again working on a large collaborative project as a core member of the creative team that is planning the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.