Exhibition of the week

Exhibition of the week

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe

Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Through May 28

Cai Guo-Qiang’s art is literally explosive, said Cathleen McGuigan in Newsweek. Often, “the Chinese artist uses gunpowder—that ancient Chinese invention—as the primary material in his art.” Sometimes he draws with it, burning charred and smoky patterns onto paper panel that he hinges together “like a traditional screen.” Sometimes he creates explosive performance works: In 1992, he sat in the middle of a field filled with elaborate patterns made from gunpowder fuses. “The fuses were lit, and the whole shebang blew up.” At the Guggenheim’s retrospective of the artist, Cai’s spectacular performances are unfortunately represented only by video recordings, which barely hint at “the edgy allure of his grand public works.” But a wide variety of paintings, sculptures, and works of installation art demonstrate his vaulting ambition and tireless invention. “The ideas keep exploding like crackling fireworks.”

The problem is that those ideas “are really nothing new,” said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. Cai’s conceptual artworks are ostensibly about such topics as terrorism, China’s Cultural Revolution, or the clash of East and West. But they don’t “engage or explore the social issues to which they refer.” They merely cater to viewers’ pre-existing opinions about those issues. Cai undeniably has a flair for spectacle. One installation here includes 99 stuffed wolves. The list of other artworks “reads like a mix between an evangelical tent revival announcement and a 19th-century circus poster.” Flashing lights and loud noises abound. The show’s centerpiece is Inopportune: Stage One (2004), in which nine Chevy Metros hang in a tumbling pattern from the middle of the museum’s rotunda. “The reference is to terrorist car bombings,” but Cai’s shiny lights and polished metals glamorize the violence he ostensibly decries.

The artist’s fatal shortcoming is “an almost Disneyesque” penchant for flashy effects, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Cai’s elaborately staged spectacles don’t draw from his Chinese upbringing or native traditions. Rather, they evoke Western predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Yves Klein. Cai’s artwork is better “when he is more hands-on.” The finest here are the modest gunpowder drawings, with their “feathery depictions of pine needles and branches that evoke traditional Chinese and Japanese brush painting.” Cai has managed to become world-famous by “thinking big” and putting on a good show. But when he thinks small, “the impresario becomes an artist.”