Venue: Lobby at the main entrance, No.1 exhibition room, 2F and ChimneyFloor plan
Chief Sponsor: INFINITI
Ticket Price: 50.00 Tickets Info Damai Gewara
The Power Station of Art is proud to present the major solo exhibition Cai GuoQiang: The Ninth Wave by the New York- based Chinese-born artist. This will be the first solo exhibition by a living artist at the institution, China’s first publicly funded contemporary art museum.
Cai GuoQiang: The Ninth Wave addresses one of the greatest challenges faced by mankind: Earth’s current environmental and ecological crisis. Evidenced by the high levels of smog in the air and the incident of 16,000 dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River last year, environmental issues in China—and the world at large have reached a critical level. Exploring the imminent challenge posed by the environment, the artist references a theme in traditional Chinese aesthetics and philosophy: humanity’s longing to return to a primordial landscape and spiritual homeland.
Many of the works in the exhibition were made especially for the exhibition at the Power Station of Art.A series of art interventions and artworks were realized in the public realm leading up to the opening, allowing the public to witness various stages of the creative process:
July 12 – The installation work The Ninth Wave set sail from the artist’s hometown of Quanzhou;
July 17 – The Ninth Wave sailed along the Huangpu River, past the Bund, and arrived at the pier by the Power Station of Art;
July 20 – Cai Guo-Qiang completed his first work on site, the gunpowder drawing Impression of The Ninth Wave;
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About the artist
Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China) currently works and lives in New York. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy, and his work has since crossed multiple mediums within art, including drawing, installation, video and performance. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to the development of his signature explosion events. Cai was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, and the Praemium Imperiale in 2012. Additionally, he was also among the five artists honored with the first U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts award.
Among his many solo exhibitions and projects include Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2006, and his retrospective I Want to Believe, which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2008. The exhibition traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing later that year, and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2009. In 2011, his work was exhibited in Cai Guo-Qiang: Hanging Out in the Museum at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and his most recent exhibition, Falling Back to Earth opened in November 2013 at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Australia.
Shanghai was Cai Guo-Qiang’s first “port of call” after he left his hometown of Quanzhou. Since studying in Shanghai, he has since returned a number of times to his “mother port.” In 2001, he designed the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Cityscape in Shanghai, which then established a foundation for his continued artistic activities in China, the most notable of which is his participation in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. In 2002, Cai held his first solo exhibition in China at the former Shanghai Art Museum.