CAI GUO-QIANG (B. 1957)

Cai Guo-Qiang is an internationally-recognized Chinese artist best known for his works composed of explosions, gunpowder drawings and installations. Among his numerous accolades and exhibitions, Cai received the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, was the first Chinese artist to hold a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008, and served as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

His installations often involve a radical reorientation of time and history. The works featured here derive from his 2006 installation, Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof, Transparent Monument (2006). This was a site-specific installation constructed for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This scrupulously realized piece was composed of four parts: Clear Sky Black Cloud, Transparent Monument, Nontransparent Monument, and Move Along, Nothing to See Here. The set of five works presented here are ink rubbings taken from the nine-panel green limestone relief titled Nontransparent Monument, a multipart narrative relief sculpture that documents recent political and cultural events, memorializing as if they are the petty and inscrutable images of ancient history found in cave paintings or archeological discoveries.