Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming

Cai Guo-Qiang’s solo exhibition Odyssey and Homecoming tours to the New Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, featuring the newly commissioned kinetic light installation Encounter with the Unknown.

The Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), located beside the Oriental Pearl television tower in Shanghai, will open its doors to the public for the first time on July 8, 2021. Designed by the renowned Ateliers Jean Nouvel, MAP aspires to become a new landmark of Shanghai’s cultural landscape and a platform for international exchange of arts and culture. For its inaugural program, the museum will present three major exhibitions: Light: Works from Tate’s Collection; Joan Miro. Women, Birds, Stars; Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming.

Touring from the Palace Museum in Beijing where it opened last December, Odyssey and Homecoming features 119 of Cai’s signature gunpowder paintings and other works, including his widely acclaimed first-ever VR work Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City. The works in the exhibition represent Cai’s research, exploration, and voyage across the globe, recreating his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History project for audiences in China. The exhibition will take place across three floors of the new 40,000-square-metre museum space. In three large galleries on the second floor, the exhibition unfolds across two sections. “Odyssey” features artworks from his solo exhibitions in world-renowned museums, in which he engages with the essence of Western art and civilization embodied within those institutions. He dialogued with classical Greek and Roman art in Pompeii and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Italian Renaissance at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Spanish Golden Age and Baroque Art at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Russian Socialist Realism at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Modernism at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the early roots of Modern art in Cézanne's hometown of Aix-en-Provence, in addition to ongoing trips to trace Medieval art history. The other half, “Homecoming,” debuts new works that encompass aspects of traditional Chinese art and culture as well as the cosmos as his eternal homeland. The fourth floor will showcase the artist’s early works in dialogue with his original passion for painting, as well as A Material Odyssey, a special exhibition curated by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

This exhibition marks another important step in Cai’s homecoming to Shanghai, following his 2014 solo exhibition at the Power Station of Art. Cai first saw foreign painters’ original works in person decades ago in Shanghai, which also sowed the seeds for his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History. Visitors will see how the fusion of and dialogue between the past and present, East and West, can all coexist in an individual. Showing this may have some special significance in a world that is shadowed by the pandemic and currently deglobalizing to a state of mutual isolation. The exhibition poses the questions: Can different cultures reach mutual respect? Can great cultures specific to certain people become shared heritage for all humankind?

Through his trademark artistic process, Cai intricately patterns gunpowder and explodes it on canvas: a fiery event that leaves painterly residues. Rather than division and isolation, the explosion as the paintbrush coalesce in Cai’s monumental works to advance cultural exchange and shared understanding beyond nationality. The artworks on view color a new global vision for the history of art and imbue painting with a reinvigorated capacity to engage with contemporary issues.

Li Jinzhao, Chairman of the Shanghai Lujiazui Development (Group) Co., Ltd, comments, “As the MAP’s opening exhibition, Odyssey and Homecoming presents how an artist can travel freely without the shackles of region, culture, or convention. It manifests the museum’s spirit of being based in Shanghai and looking at the world and its fundamental mission of connecting the Eastern and Western cultures.”

As a special new commission for Odyssey and Homecoming, Cai created the site-specific, kinetic light installation Encounter with the Unknown for the monumental X Hall at MAP, which measures over 30 meters tall and with a floor area of 17 square meters. A spectacle inspired by the nature-based cosmology of the Mayan civilization, Encounter with the Unknown weaves together images from stories and myths of humans who “defied gravity” and “embraced the cosmos,” forming a tapestry of cosmologies from different civilizations. The installation takes the form of hand-crafted Mexican castillo fireworks, combining a rustic structure with the technology of computer-operated “light drawings” to create a dynamic, multidimensional image filled with wonder. The work is simultaneously a spacetime capsule and a “cosmic tree” that connects the ancient with the modern and the familiar with the foreign. Both in its concept and form, the work closely complements the “four-dimensional space-time” design concept proposed by the Museum’s architect and Cai’s vision of transforming this space into an artist’s laboratory.

Cai Guo-Qiang writes in his artist statement, “Shanghai was the actual and tangible embodiment of Western culture for the young me...This exhibition addresses the wonder of my encounters with the West, the struggle over my unrequited love for my predecessor painters, and the deep breaths that I have taken in their hometowns and in the gardens of their art. Riding on the kite of my hometown, steering the spacecraft of human childhood across romantic horizons, just as the cosmic tree, castillos, the extraterrestrials, and ‘encounter with the unknown.’ The odyssey is also a search for a greater hometown. I seek to encounter more artists from the past and present, from China and abroad, and through them,  discover a shared ‘far-off land,’ a cosmic and eternal hometown.”

The exhibition also presents ten documentary videos directed by Shanshan Xia, featuring several major art museums worldwide, and the classic works and artists from various chapters of art history with whom Cai has dialogued. Among these videos is a new documentary short highlighting the Museum of Art Pudong project. An exhibition catalogue will be available at the opening (Sir Simon Schama as the editor-in-chief, produced by Imaginist and published by Beijing Daily Newspaper Publishing House). With nearly 380 pages and over 750 illustrations, the catalogue presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History. It also features A Guide to Cai Guo-Qiang’s Dialogues: 99 Projects and Keywords, the first-ever guide that attempts to synthesize Cai’s expansive artistic output and the fundamental concepts and methodological pursuits behind it.

To download the press kit, please click here.

Press enquiries
Carol Lo, Sutton, carol@suttoncomms.com