Lot 63
  • 63

Cai Guo-Qiang

Estimate
4,800,000 - 5,500,000 HKD
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Description

  • Cai Guo-Qiang
  • Tiger and Eagle
  • gunpower and ink on paper
  • 300 by 400 cm.; 118 1/8 by 157 1/2 in.
signed in Chinese and Pinyin, titled in Chinese and dated 2005

Provenance

Private Collection
Christie's, New York, 13 November, 2007, lot 7

Exhibited

Taiwan,Taipei, Eslite Gallery, Cai Guo-Qiang, December 2005

Condition

This work is generally in good condition. There are general creases on the surface, which are consistent with the artist's working method.
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Catalogue Note

Starburst
Cai Guo-Qiang

In a poignant conversation with author Ron Rosenbaum during April of this year, Cai Guo-Qiang revealed that his first encounter with explosives was during his childhood. Growing up in Quanzhou, the young Cai heard the artillery firing in neighbouring Taiwan, which sought to maintain its independence from China. More than thirty years later, and unbeknownst to the little boy, Cai would grow to become one of the leading artists in the contemporary art world, using explosives to create art. As the dust settles and the gunpowder quietens, one finds mesmerising works such as Tiger and Eagle (Lot 63). The piece is rare not simply for its alluring nature, but because of the depth of the motivations behind it, evoking quintessentially Cai elements such as violence, astrology and animals.

The motifs of a Tiger and Eagle also play a crucial role in understanding Cai’s artistic lexicon, and are part of his on-going dialogue with his own self, with nature and with the cosmos at large. 

“The uncontrollable nature of gunpowder, along with temporal, spatial and climate changes, must be taken into account for each exhibition plan, each different theme, each different condition; and it must always burn and reveal a different meaning and expression. An extended period of planning gives way to an instant burst of strength and beauty.”1 Such
was the way Cai described the temperamental medium behind his works, which have themselves quite literally exploded on the art scene. With a bevy of exhibitions at various international museums, including the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Taipei Fine Art Museum of China, the Guggenheim
Museum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the artist has truly captured a global audience’s attention.

The aforementioned strength and beauty in Cai’s art exist in many of its heartrending idiosyncrasies. In the same conversation with Rosenbaum, for instance, the artist recounts his father incinerating a private literary collection including rare books and manuscripts, for fear of being discovered by the authorities at the time that persecuted “intellectuals”.
His father then went into a self-imposed period of exile at a nunnery, tragically tracing his beloved calligraphy into muddy puddles. The puddles would disappear when the water evaporated, leaving behind only wisps of the characters in the ground. The contrary lies in the ground briefly holding the form of Cai’s father’s memories as mud and stick converge momentarily, before they disappear into thin air.

Much in the same way, Cai’s art involves the merging of powder and fire, before these two elements disappear. However, unlike his father’s telluric works, Cai’s pieces exude an unworldly air; unlike his father’s transient pieces, what is left behind are unique, mesmeric marks of beauty on what was previously a blank canvas.

One such stunning example is Tiger and Eagle, which interestingly finds its counterpart in Cai’s father, Cai Ruiqin's Painting of One Hundred Tigers, which was also used by way of opening Cai’s show Long Scroll at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006, in turn acting as a testament to the deep significance of the magnificent beast in the artist’s oeuvre. The outline of a resilient eagle, with its wings outstretched, can be found staving off a tiger, its back in turn arched in retaliation. The two animals, one reigning the skies; the other the earth, are locked in an intense battle of might. This contest takes place in the upper right hand corner of the large canvas, while enigmatic shapes lurk beneath them.

The image of the tiger and the eagle are no strangers to the canvases of Cai Guo-Qiang. The former beast can be found in the aforementioned work Inopportune: Stage Two, an installation of nine hanging tigers; faces frozen as their contorted bodies are impaled by myriad arrows. At the time, the artist was reflecting on the effects of 9/11, and the work was an embodiment of this violence—violence between man and nature, and man and man. The installation is also reminiscent of Wu Song Slays the Tiger in the classical Chinese oeuvre, Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan). As well as this, it also evokes the imagery of Zhuge Liang, from The Story of
the Three Kingdoms (San Guo Yan Yi), who collected his enemies’ arrows by tricking them into firing toward an empty straw boat.

The eagle, on the other hand, has appeared in Man, Eagle, and Eye in the Sky, a social project that Cai produced in Egypt, where 200 eagleshaped Chinese kites were released into the Egyptian skies. The eagle was chosen to signify Alexander the Great in his famous expedition to the Temple of Amun’s Oracle, where he queried, “Will I rule the world?” and “Am I the Son of God?” The mighty bird is also significant in ancient Egyptian mythology, as the symbol of the falcon represents the God Horus. Horus was the god of the skies, the sun, battle and protection. The tiger, representing the West in Chinese astrology, while
simultaneously being considered the king of beasts and a quintessentially Chinese symbol; can here be read as an inner-exploration. The eagle, a conspicuously American icon, can perhaps even be seen as Cai grappling with his residence in New York, while balancing his Chinese identity. The use of gunpowder—a famously Chinese invention—to explore the scene
of violence further brings to mind Cai’s previous preoccupation with the notions of harmony and destruction.

The rich background to Tiger and Eagle is potent, yet it seems Cai was looking further than merely earthly muses. The placement of the eagle and the tiger, along with the mysterious silhouettes that materialise below them, seem eerily similar to the location of the constellations Aquila, Sagitta, Delphinus and Equuleus. Considering Cai’s previous
Projects for Extraterrestrials series, one can perhaps confidently assume Tiger and Eagle as a rare development of the earlier works.

Aquila, the name of the eagle constellation, is thought to be the bearer of the Greek God Zeus’ thunderbolts. Next to it one can fittingly find Sagitta, which means “arrow” in Latin. This same constellation was, rather uncannily, called “Tigris” by Armenians and Persians, a word which in their language was “arrow”, from which modern English has derived the name for the animal, the tiger, for its swiftness. When combined with the image of Cai’s Inopportune: Stage Two (2004), the image of the speared tiger becomes all the more compelling. Additionally, one can vaguely make out in Tiger and Eagle the outlines of Delphinus (Dolphin), the curvature of the constellation’s dolphin rising as if out of the water; while the head of Equuleus, or, “little horse” can be seen, its hooves rising into the air. These four creatures’ positions also align with the constellations, creating an intense instance of coincidence.

The unbridled nature of explosives is one of the most enthralling aspects of Cai’s works. This medium, so erratic and volatile, capable of destroying everything in its wake, is somehow reined in by the artist. His pieces lie between control and chaos; of the earthly and otherworldly, and in one moment of eruption, capture intense moments of personal conflict.

1 Zhao Yang and Wei Jing Li, Cai Guo Qiang, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2010, p.92