Schon im August letzten Jahres hat der in New York lebende Feuerwerkskünstler Cai Guo-Qiang in Shangai am helllichten Tage dieses Feuerwerk der Farben abgefeuert: The Ninth Wave, realized on the riverfront of the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China. Und so sehr mir dieses Holi-Zeug mittlerweile auf den Puffer geht… Das sieht schon geil aus.
Cai Guo-Qiang is a New York based artist and one of the furthermost celebrated contemporary artists originating from China. He is known for a remarkable new kind of fireworks spectacles which he calls “explosion events.” He has taken gunpowder, one of China’s Four Great Inventions and led the way in a new impressive form of art that is substantial and metaphorical. His fireworks represent nature, culture, life, and death.
Cai’s captivation with pyrotechnics had origins in weaponry and physics, evolving into an affinity with traditional Chinese brush painting. Thus the violent explosions are transformed into a tool of art, creating a masterpiece in the sky, a masterpiece that only has a short lifetime, and fades away. Cai’s daytime “explosion events,” intimates classical brush painting. Cai involves organic vegetable dyes as opposed to just gunpowder, the smoke from these “explosion events” gradually blurs in the air almost as ink from a brush stroke is absorbed by rice paper in traditional painting. His daylight skywriting signifies his deep traditionalism and his modernism all at once.
Cai’s work in front of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, China is eight minutes of colors filing the sky, in a ritualistically sincere elucidation of the ‘death of nature’. The show personifies the natural world with remembrance, looking back on the past and the transitory nature of time through a display of colorful smoke. The smoke fades away until nothing is left, no reminiscence of the beauty that once was, just like everything that exists in nature.
(Fotos mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Public Delivery)
(Direktlink, via this isn’t happiness)