In 2008, at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, Cai Guoqiang's creativity surprised the world. What kind of surprises will Cai Guoqiang, who continues to serve as the visual art designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, bring to the world?
Cai Guoqiang close-up
In "Cai Guoqiang: Long Journey and Return" currently being held at the Pudong Art Museum, people can see the gunpowder sketch "Historical Footprints: Plans for the Beijing Olympic Games" created for the 29 fireworks footprints of the Beijing Olympic Games, and can also see Cai Guoqiang's work "Galaxy Ice" created by using gunpowder detonation and exhibited together with a replica of "Ice Playing" jointly painted by Qing Dynasty court painters Zhang Weibang and Yao Wenhan, echoing the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in a special visual form.
Present tradition with contemporary art
There were also ice and snow sports in ancient China, of which skating was the most typical. Winter rivers in northern China are generally frozen, and people can walk freely on the ice, so there is an activity called "ice frolicing".
In the Qing Dynasty, Bingxiao was not a simple game project, but also a kind of military training. The Qing Dynasty army had an ice shoe battalion, and the organization in charge of the skate camp was called the Skate Division. During the Qianlong period, court painters Zhang Weibang and Yao Wenhan jointly painted "Ice Painting", which delicately depicted the ice movement of the court, so that people could understand the strange skills of ice sports in the Qing Dynasty.
The scene depicted in "Ice Play" is very grand, thousands of members of the skate camp are divided into eight groups, and each four groups are organized into two teams to perform on the ice. You can see the team members arranged on the ice as "Ruyi Cirrus Clouds", and make difficult actions such as "Big Scorpion", "Golden Rooster Independence", "Nezha Noisy Sea" and "Double Flying Swallow". The skates in the painting are made of steel blades inlaid into wooden boards, which is the same principle as the skates used today.
Part of "Ice Play Map"
In response to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Cai Guoqiang used the Forbidden City collection "Ice Play" as inspiration, and used similar whirlpool slides and silhouettes of modern skaters in his works to create a romantic and profound and mysterious "Galaxy Ice". Unlike previous creations, which mainly used gunpowder and canvas, Cai Guoqiang first carried out large-scale blasting on glass and mirror surfaces when creating "Galaxy Ice", which showed a snowy texture after blasting, and groups of skaters swirled and jumped on the blue ice, which was very dynamic. The glass and mirror, although fragile, withstood the detonation of gunpowder under cai Guoqiang's control, creating the ideal image.
Cai Guoqiang's work "Galaxy Ice"
Cai Guoqiang's work requires the audience to watch it live, so that they can feel the sensory experience brought by different materials. According to Cai Guoqiang, "Glass, mirrors and canvases are somewhat different in philosophical thinking, but they are all the themes of my artistic creation. It is interesting that on the mirror surface is one world and on the glass is another world, and they are stacked together to become three-dimensional and rich in meaning."
Aesthetic expression is sought in the blast
On a panel with a black background in the exhibition, a visual map of the locations of all of Cai Guoqiang's art projects so far is marked. Cai Guoqiang introduced a set of data: so far, he has implemented a total of 538 projects around the world, of which 101 have failed to achieve. In this map, it seems to see a walker who trekked through mountains and rivers, tenacious and unyielding.
Exhibition posters
In traditional Chinese culture, gunpowder has the effect of driving away evil spirits and avoiding harm, and whenever there is a folk traditional festival or a variety of celebration evenings, people will set off firecrackers and fireworks to show their joy. Nowadays, with the increasing attention paid to environmental protection, gunpowder and Chinese urban life are getting farther and farther away from urban life due to the adverse impact of large amounts of gunpowder burning on the environment. Cai Guoqiang, however, has a unique way of discovering an aesthetic expression from the detonation of gunpowder.
In 1984, Cai Guoqiang began to use gunpowder in his paintings. From his works at that time, it can be seen that the language of painting still prevailed. Two years later, he traveled east to Japan to study, and continued to study how to finely control the detonation of gunpowder to achieve the effect he wanted. Kung Fu paid off, and he gradually found a way to tame gunpowder. In 1990, his blasting project Project Three for Aliens was implemented in Provence, France, a mystical art form that impressed critics and called him "an artist with an oriental mindset." The 29 huge firework footprints fired at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games made Olympic fireworks director Cai Guoqiang and his "explosive art" known to more and more Chinese people.
Cai Guoqiang's work "Wangxiang: Plan For Mankind No. 4" photographed by Cai Wenyou
The core of oriental aesthetics always carries a kind of romance, like the legendary meeting place of the cowherd and the weaver girl, on a bridge built by countless magpies. Although "explosion" is always associated with "danger" in people's minds, it is enough to touch people's hearts in Cai Guoqiang's artistic creation. At dawn in June 2015, a 500-meter-high fireworks ladder roared up on the seashore of Huiyu Island, a small fishing village in Quanzhou, standing between heaven and earth. This is Cai Guoqiang's work "Ladder" that has been explored for more than 20 years, and it is also a gift he dedicated to his hundred-year-old grandmother and hometown.
"Daytime Fireworks" at the Forbidden City
In this "Cai Guoqiang, Long Journey and Return", the first thing that caught the audience's attention was "Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City", which is also the work with the most content and the most complex production technology in the entire exhibition. It contains three elements: a model of the Forbidden City han white jade handmade by craftsmen in Cai Guoqiang's hometown of Quanzhou over five months; a gunpowder sketch on a hemp paper screen; and a VR video work that blends models and fireworks. Four HTC VIVE Pro head-mounted VR displays were provided for visitors to use.
The Forbidden City in Beijing was the imperial palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, formerly known as the Forbidden City, built in 1420 and exactly 600 years old by 2020. Cai Guoqiang wants to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the Forbidden City with a fireworks ceremony, but as one of the largest and best-preserved wooden structures in the world, it is not allowed to use open flames to set off fireworks in the Forbidden City. Therefore, Cai Guoqiang scaled it down, and the craftsmen in his hometown used Han white jade to make a model, and used virtual reality technology to produce a VR video work "Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City", using the ancient medium of gunpowder to challenge the debuggability, controllability and sophistication of virtual reality.
Cai Guoqiang's work "Structure" by Cai Wenyou
At the technical level, this work uses a variety of techniques such as digital drawing restoration of the Forbidden City, real fireworks blasting, drone shooting, physical White Jade carving, 3D scanning, model restoration and digital painting. Through the digital virtual reality production, the field blasting effect is reproduced, including the light and shadow of the fireworks explosion, the reflection of the white jade material, the splash of the fire and other details are all restored one by one, which is quite ingenious.
During the minutes-long dream tour, the Han White Jade Forbidden City is placed between the mountains and rivers of Liuyang, the hometown of fireworks, and the audience constantly changes their perspectives, sometimes immersed in the white Han White Jade Palace to watch the spectacular scene of hundreds of colorful fireworks shooting into the sky; sometimes soaring high in the sky, passing through the colorful smoke, and the brilliant light and shadow bloom around them...
This is a special creation of Cai Guoqiang to extend his highly original gunpowder art language into the VR virtual reality dream. Cai Guoqiang said, "I graft different languages and materials together, and I am not afraid of its jerkiness and contradictions. For me, the conceptuality generated by this collage and conflict is even more important. (Yuchhe)