"We live in a world full of terror, of discussion and fear of terror. However, if you present only that, you are not providing a perspective. What if it is also something that is very beautiful and dreamlike? Does that reflect something? I always come back to this point: that art ought not to just restate what we know and how we live, it must provide a perspective, a distance."

Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957)l. Model (2007) for installation of Inopportune: Stage One, 2004 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2008

Cai’s early training in stage design proved to be the perfect preparation for his dynamic installations. Spatially, the display of elements floating in space gives a sense of antigravity and other-worldliness. Similar to unfolding Chinese hand scroll paintings and screens, the installations unfold as Cai composes a linear sequence that implies movement through an event.

Since 9/11, terrorist attacks and suicide bombings have become a central theme of Cai’s work. The clearest example, Inopportune: Stage One (2004), was first realized in December 2004 for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, and is now in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. It simulates the trajectory of an exploding automobile tumbling through space, offering up the contradiction between a spectator’s abhorrence of violence and attraction to the abstract beauty of some violent images. Nine white Ford Tauruses are positioned in various stages of movement through the air. The first car remains inert on the ground. As each subsequent vehicle progresses through the sequence in midair, electric light rods protruding from their bodies emit blinding, flashing lights that mimic an exploding bomb as well as fireworks. The palette of the light rods begins with a white, hot light, and grows progressively warmer and more vibrant as the angles of the cars rise and the ”explosion” progresses through time, then quiets down into soft hues of purple and pink and at last a soft blue. The last vehicle is placed on the ground, absent of any light, as if the car bombing never happened. The overall composition has the look of motion photography or a sequence of freeze frames from a movie. According to the artist, the expansive horizontal layout—which viewers walk along and through to experience fully—also refers to the temporal experience of viewing Chinese handscroll paintings, whose narratives unfold horizontally.

For the exhibition copy of Inopportune: Stage One fabricated for his Guggenheim retrospective, Cai has reconfigured the work as a vertical installation that rises up through the open central space of the museum’s rotunda building.

• What is your first response to this work? Make a list of all the words that come to mind to describe this work and your reaction to it. In class share your responses. How many are shared? How many are unique?
• The original version of this work is configured as a horizontal installation. The exhibition copy fabricated for the Guggenheim has been reconfigured dramatically as a vertical installation that begins on the ground floor and ends with the last car resting on the highest level of the rotunda’s ramp. Which installation would you prefer to visit? Why?
• Cai frequently reconfigures components of his installations. Think of another way that these nine cars could be shown in a different space, for instance your school cafeteria, a local shopping mall, or a town park.
• Cai sees both beauty and destruction in violence. Discuss this dichotomy and the possibility of being both attracted to and repelled by a single image or event.
• Inopportune: Stage One ends with one car that has landed safely, without a scratch or dent, with all four wheels securely on the ground. How does this positioning affect the way you interpret this work?

• Although Cai is depicting a car bombing, a terrorist act that is aimed at destruction, he is avidly nonideological and declares that an artist’s task is not to say whether something is good or bad but simply to show reality in a new way. Do you agree or disagree? Explain your response.
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• In planning the installation of Inopportune: Stage One for the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Cai used an architectural model of the museum and model cars to choreograph the most dramatic vertical effect. Sketch a plan for an installation work. Then, use cardboard or foamcore to create the architectural model for a space where your work would be installed. Using readymade toys or handmade models, show how your installation would be realized within the space. Share your ideas with your classmates.
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• Art critics have compared Inopportune: Stage One to works by other artists, including:
  
  • Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), Transverse Gallop, 1887
  • Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Ecstasy of St. Theresa, 1652
  • Chen Rong (13th century), Nine Dragons, 1244; this work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  What parallels to Cai’s work do you see in each of these works?
  Visual Arts