Cai Guo-Qiang

signed in Pinyin, titled in English and Chinese and dated 2005

Private Collection, USA
Christie’s, New York, 15 November, 2006, lot 1

Germany, Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, Head On, 26 August - 15 October, 2006

This work is generally in good condition. There are occasional, very minor marks on the surface which are inherent to the artist's working method. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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A Fable of Human Civilisation
Two Lions

Cai Guo-qiang is certainly an artist with one of the most global vision in contemporary Chinese art. In recent years, after he had relocated back to China from New York, he was invited to perform his large- scale explosion events across different prominent museums in the world. Indeed, almost all of the most important museums in the world have held his exhibitions in the past. In the last two years only, Cai’s works have already been shown in major museums such as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Zhejiang Art Museum. While previously, they were shown at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Guggenheim Museum in Berlin, New York, and Bilbao, and National Art Museum of China, among others. Asides from the well- known explosion events, Cai Guo-Qiang’s ever-expanding artistic practice also encompasses installation works and other various projects. The lot on offer, Two Lions (Lot 890), is a gunpowder on paper masterpiece that belongs to the body of works exhibited during the solo exhibition “Head On”, at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin in 2006. During that period, the artist had extended the political affairs of the time into the discussion of human civilisation, fully displaying his all-around insight as well as his prompt response to the various issues stemming from human civilisation. It should be noted that the Head On installation was later collected by the Deutsche Bank, thus Two Lions remains as one of the few works still available from the notable solo exhibition.

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 had a dramatic impact on Cai Guo-Qiang who was living in New York City. His initial exploration into the relationships between violence, survival of the species, heroism, and courage further developed into several influential installation series. Among these works, after the installation Inopportune: Stage Two from 2004, Cai Guo-Qiang began to use the theme of animal as a way to investigate and reflect upon the effect of 9/11 on mankind. He has said previously, “it’s about animals and spirits that represent the human world, without attaining to a concrete human form.”¹ Cai has always focused on the intertwined issues of mankind and civilisation, with the image of the animal serving as one of the core vehicles navigating his many works after the millennium. The theatrical installation Inopportune: Stage Two from 2004 was first shown in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. It featured nine realistically fabricated tigers being struck by arrows; while some of them struggled in pain, others were rendered in distorted body forms, together composing a truly astonishing installation piece. The work was originally inspired by the heroic tale of Wu Song Slays the Tiger in Chinese classical literature. However, under the backdrop of the post- 9/11 period, it has turned into a satirical twist to the heroism expressed in the story. At the same time, it also explored into the explicit violence caused by mankind in nature. Asides from the theme of environmental protection, the work is imbued with political analogies; under American heroism, tiger has become a victim infiltrated by arrows, signifying violence brought on by civilisation. The emanating form of the arrows in the work not only echoes the artist’s explosive visual style from his other works, but also stirs up the memory of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Two years later, in his solo exhibition “Head On” at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Cai presented a large scale installation work Head On using the motif of the wolf, and the present gunpowder work Two Lions. The artist once again used animal as the main motif and designed a pack of highly realistic wolf models crashing into a transparent glass wall, with the height and the thickness of the wall resembling The Berlin Wall. Though the work was shown in Berlin, its meaning is not at all restricted to the history of Germany, but rather traverses through all regions. “I tried to find an animal that represents a collective heroism, an animal that likes company, that lives in a pack.”² Cai Guo-Qiang has in the end found a similarity between wolf and human, and attempts to incorporate the mankind tragedy within the work. “I wanted to portray the universal human tragedy resulting from this blind urge to press forward, the way we try to attain our goals without compromise. This is something that keeps repeating itself all throughout human history. In Zen philosophy, there is this idea of tragic beauty based on the notion that most of what happens has no  meaning whatsoever.”³ The present work Two Lions was also shown in his solo exhibition in Berlin and is one of Cai Guo-Qiang’s renowned gunpowder works. Similar to Head On, Two Lions also uses animal as the main protagonist, but instead of the wolf, on view is the image of two lions; while one is seen perpetrated by arrows while leaping across the top of the work, another has its back facing the viewer, silently viewing the suffering of the lion. The work contains a similar metaphor to Head On, and allows us to understand the thought process behind the large-scale installation. Composed of six gunpowder work on screens, Two Lions is certainly a monumental and rare work by the artist.

1 “Tragic Beauty, Conversation with Cai Guo-Qiang”, 2006
2 Refer to 1
3 Refer to 1