Fengshui in Cai's work

The underlying principles of Fengshui are deeply rooted in Chinese cosmology. The essence of fengshui, explains the scholar Ole Bruun, is that configurations of land forms and bodies of water direct the flow of the universal qi, or cosmic currents, which by the advice of a specialist can be brought to optimum advantage for a person’s wealth, happiness, longevity, and procreation; similarly, a malicious flow of qi may bring disaster. The Chinese character 風，means wind, has within it an ancient element, a cocoon, that varries the sense of giving birth,growing, and mulitplying. At the same time, the external form of the character expands and spreads out on either side. The character 水, means water embodies both the form and meaning of flowing movement and infinite extension. The compound fengshui thus incorporates the auspicious concepts of generation, development, and eternal continuation. Through feng and shui, human beings are cosmologically connected with the universe, life and time. The geomantic practice of fengshui thus developed as a result of the study of nature and human relationships to it.

At the core of Chinese cosmology is the concept of qi. Literally meaning “breath”, qi actually refers to the constantly moving essence of life, vital energy, or cosmic breath. Qi was believed to congeal densely into rocks and disperse vapoursly into clouds, transforming its basic matter according to its own cosmological laws. It courses constantly like a flowing gas, a natural fluid, or an electrical circuit, animating all living things, including the landscape. It represents both the unity of all in the cosmos, which proceeds from the same essence, and its differentiation into “myriad things”. Properly responding to and directing the flow of qi is at the essence of fengshui.

In Chinese painting, qi is also essential. In the act of painting, the artist engages in a dialogue with the natural world and harmonizes his or her qi with that of the cosmos. The movement in the painting is thus that of qi. Everything in the image, whether figures, landscape, flowers, trees, or animals, is expected to be filled with vitality as components of one underlying natural unity. In the composition, the placement of empty space is crucial because qi is everywhere. Landscape, water, and mist form contrasts of substance and void. Emptiness enables qi to move freely through the composition. It is the proper arrangement of qi that gives a landscape its sense of liveliness, its essential sense of movement. Artists must provide a place for the qi to enter and to exit. Qi, rhythm, life, and movement.

The aspect of Fengshui lies at the center of many Cai’s projects. Through his work, as audiences engage in the dialogue between humankind and other planets, between people and the earth, the desert, and the city, they also reaffirm their own existence.Gunpowder is a by-product of the Chinese attempt to discover the elixir of immortality. It has the power to destroy but also, by association with cinnabar, the ability to cure and reconstruct. In the physical world, you destroy existing things but at the same time create the opportunity for something to be born or reborn. This is the method Cai uses to communicate with his audience. He knows the violence and danger of gunpowder, but because of this he feels its challenge and interest. Moreover, he feels these kinds of accidental and uncontrollable qualities create vivid new life and give power to his art. “The paint, gunpowder, and other materials, in the course of the explosion, are destroyed, burned, or deconstructed. So this is an intensive battle between power and material. In this confrontation between control and anti-control, between fire and canvas, I try to vividly present the process of exchange between design and materials. This original design was transformed by the explosion and subsequent process of burning. I only designed a model for this process, but to complete these works, I need to rely on the power of nature.”

Cai Guo-Qiang: Explosive Earth Art

Conceptually and visually, Cai’s focus is ultimately the universe that surrounds us: its birth, existence, and destruction. Such themes have has a continuous, cyclical presence in his production over the last twenty years. “Large gun-powder drawings, which depict, in turn, natural forces, fantasy flying machines, and past projects swirling around a galaxy.”

He is a transnational artist, drawing on Chinese and Western artistic traditions but embracing a futuristic vision. His work spans the media of drawing, sculpture, and theater. It is intimate but can be experienced simultaneously by thousands of people. Reconceiving techniques that have been used for centuries, Cai has invented a new way to be a totally contemporary artist. His work has an abstract structure but often encompassses a narrative, telling a stroy or rendering an impression of a landscape or natural experience. It revisits traditional myths and parables through contemporary artistic forms. Chinese philosophy is filtered through the structures of conceptual art to create a unique intellectual armature that shapes the perception of the work.

Cai applies Chinese artistic traditions to the innovations of Land art, using the elements of earth, air, fire, and water in unexpected ways. He has invented a unique approach to exploit these basic natural materials as artistic media. 

In March 2012, seven hundred people were invited to witness the three gunpowder drawings that Cai created for MOCA exhibition. The astonishing spectacle demonstrated the artist’s extraditionary fusion of theatre, drawing, and live sculpture. 

From his work, you can see the high contrast between fire, exploration and the delicate paper material, as well as the patient preparation. It is a powerful drawing of natural forces. 

The engagement with community also plays an important role in his practice.The production of those gun-powder drawings involve studio team, fireworks experts, volunteers and local fire department. It was always a group project, not an isolated individual effort. The work is not static but experimental. The explosion events are shared experiences. His work is made with basic natural elements, but it transcends the material to enter the immaterial. 

Reference: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, MOCA. His work has been influenced by and often discussed within the context of the artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim; all explore physical mark making upon the landscape.

Fragile Abysm

French psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski talked about the different characters of lights in his book "Lived Time". He described daylight as something creating "distance, extension, and fullness", and dark night as "personal, invades the body rather than keeping its distance". In his words, the darkness could " touch me in a more intimate way, penetrating my body."

This idea provided a different direction in thinking about how to capture the human perception by creating an immersive installation piece. Some installation works made by Lucas Samaras, James Turrell, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Morris and Yayoi Kusama are not trying to heighten the perceptual awareness of our bodies but rather to reduce it, "by assimilating the viewer in various ways to the surrounding space".

I like the idea of relating the dark installation with the feeling of dissolution in senses. Darkness, as a saturated color does seem infinite and penetrating to me. Since our perception is highly dependent on the visibility, there would be no perceptible space between the selfness and the external surroundings in a total darkness, where the body's physical limits are established and our relationships to the external space are destroyed. Being in a total darkness is like being in an out-space situation, with no gravity, no relation to the earth. Inside a conceptual infinite universe, viewers who are experiencing a dark installation will see themselves in the lack of vision and orientation, in the lack of security and control, and then in the lack of boundaries of their own bodies and the relationship to the Others. This is why people would feel "decentred" in this kind of installations, when we are no longer the centre of our spacial sensibilities.

This "decentred" experience is the core in understanding James Turrell's work. Inside his creation of those opaque but evanescent color spaces, viewers are confronted with their imaginative seeings and lost their senses in the distinguish between seeings from the inside mental and the seeings from the outside world. This kind of experience is spiritual and absolute.

The world is all around, so is your perception

El Lissitzky said, "Space is not there for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it... We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies." I like this quote a lot in thinking about the action of viewing an art piece. Since the space is multi-sensible, it is certainly not just for the eyes, it is for the body, with the mind for reading it, interpreting it, and for forgetting it. The space is the location of a kind of "being", in one moment. The space is existing within the present, the past, and the future. Therefore a site is filled with possibilities of inventions and reconstruction. The meaning of a space is forever-changing, just like our perception of it.

Installation work, as an art practice that aimed to create an immersive environment, an absorptive moment for the viewers, certainly establishes a particular "space" for the spectators. Viewers' reading on the work is always significant in adding another layer of meanings to the work of its own. Therefore, installation art is always incomplete to its full meaning, and is alway partial to its whole contexts. Viewers' physical and mental engagements can always contribute to the core of the work within their conscious knowledge and unconscious association. The reading process of a work can certainly be influenced by the way it presented, by the circumstance of the display, but the action of "entering into" from the inner spirit of the work toward the feeling of a viewer is always unclear, sacred, and uncanny. How subjectivity is unfolded through the observation of objectivity is the question for a metaphysical concern.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is absolutely helpful when we thinking about how visuals become knowledge, as the way art objects become meanings. So Merleau-Ponty's claim that the perception is never just about the visuals is so true that we need to consider the reading of an installation work on the behalf of the whole body, with multiply sensibilities. The interaction between the selfness and the rest of the world is a question about the human perception, with the physicality of one's presence and conceptual layers that constitute the presence. Just as Bishop's words, " the world is all around me, not in front of me." So when discussing the use of Theatricality in installation art in responding to Minimalism, artists create a specific space for viewers to enter into and then invite them to play the role of "actors". And the artist is the director of this constructed dramatic play. In thinking about the formal aspect of the sculptural elements in this kind of installation work, every piece of object is functioning as a part of the "plot". Objects with their use values/ practical capabilities and their sign values/ cultural meanings enter into the readers' minds, and then provoke the spectator to recall their relationships to those objects or events. All of these elements, material objects and conceptual feelings or memories come together inside the viewers' mental world to contribute to their experience with the piece.

Art as Critique

In the 1964, Bianchini Gallery had an "American Supermarket" exhibition. A new role of installation art brought the art world's attention. Within the wide and wild usage of everyday objects and already-mades, a close relationship between artworks and the notion of "retail experience" became the focus of discussion. Those commercial objects and our relations with them entered into the so-called "high-browed" fine art places. Actually, there're several groups of art critics are working on the discussion on the relationship between the art objects and the everyday objects. Following the Marxism philosophy, all art objects are essentially commodity, and then must obey the rule of "use value, exchange value and sign value". It is interesting to think about that in relating the role of installation artwork within its critical function in commenting on the relation between viewers/consumers and arts/commodity, as well as the critique of the global capitalized situation.

So that makes me think about the role of installation art working as a critique more when Claire Bishop articulated the idea of Institutional Critique. After Vietnam war and the rise of Feminism, scholar like Richard Flood pointed out that the younger generation started to acknowledge that the politically disengaged art could be seen as complicit with the status quo, and argued that any art object that gratified the market implicitly supported a conservative ideology in which capitalism dovetailed with patriarchy, an imperialist foreign policy, racism and a host of other social problem.

Therefore, the work of Hans Haacke made us rethink about the relationship between artists and museum patrons, trustees, politics and business, I thought about Haacke's project "Calligraphie" as the perfect example to support his idea on that. The "Calligraphie" proposal was finally turned down by the museum because the artist's choice on the Arabic translation of the French declaration of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", which was ironic because the spirit of those three words should not be limited by language or the ideology behind a language. But the museum's rejection on that actually was expected and made the soul of the critical role of Haacke's piece.

Absorptive Dreams

Freud interpreted dream in its three characteristics: it is primarily visual; it has a composite structure; and dream has the ability to let each element to be replaced by an associative word or syllable.

This structure could be useful in deconstructing various genres of art practices, not just installation art, but also films, fictions, paintings, and so on. Actually, all of these cultural elements could be used, manipulated and represented in a certain way to create an immersive environment within one installation work.

In reading Claire Bishop's book, Installation Art, I like the term of "physically immersive" and "psychologically absorptive" she used to describe Ilya Kabakov's work that functions as a "total installation". Besides providing an external appearance of the work, which is the primary visual in thinking about a dream-image, installation artists are supposed to create an environment to establish a composite structure to let the viewers enter into the place that is filled with elements open for free-associate. Just like interpreting a dream, viewers enter into a sphere created by the artist and read the visible to come up with a meaning, with sensory immediacy and conscious perception, also with unconscious imagination and self-reflecting. The external aspects of an installation would transfer into something like internal spirits and then enter into the inner central part of the viewers' cultural and historical memory. Memory and dream are always one step away from the spectator's presence within the moment within the space; however, they are both haunting the core of how we view the status quo despite its appearance or platforms.

So it is true to agree with John Dewey's idea that "art is experience", which functions as "heightened vitality" and "complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events". Environments, as moments of being with a high degree of associated meanings can always provoke or confirm the reader's sense of self-presence.