Newsweek profiles Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang in its February 28 issue of Newsweek. Cai is known for his “explosive” art work and has won several prizes and awards for his work. He is also noted for his current art direction for the Beijing Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies.
Cai is definitely cool, in every sense of the word. With the boom—pardon the expression—in contemporary Chinese art, he’s become a star. In November, he broke the auction record for a contemporary Chinese artist when a set of 14 of his gunpowder drawings sold at Christie’s in Hong Kong for $9.5 million. This week his first major retrospective opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (through May 28) and will later travel to Beijing and Bilbao. Sorry—there won’t be any live explosions. But the show demonstrates his vast ambition and inventiveness, and includes painting, drawing, video, sculpture and installation art. The pieces at the Guggenheim echo the edgy allure of his grand public works—the paradox of light and dark, playfulness and danger, timelessness and mortality. If you can’t make it to New York or Bilbao, too bad. But he’s also working on the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, which will reach 4 billion people.
For more information on the images above, scroll over the “Notes” link. For more on the artist, as well as more samples of his work, check out this link to his Guggenheim exhibit and this link to a PBS resource.
