Book dossier

Cai Guo-Qiang

by Guoqiang Cai, Dan Cameron, Nicholas Mirzoeff

My Stories of Painting is the first exhibition that will focus on Cai's long journey of painting in terms of two parallel paths. The first traces his decades of restless exploration in painting, presenting over a hundred works from different periods, of varying scale, and across various mediums - many of which are shown for the first time. The trajectory begins with his time in China: watercolours and oil paintings, assignments from his student days, experimental paintings, and oil paintings with gunpowder; followed by his time in Japan: paintings created purely with gunpowder, and gunpowder drawings for explosion events; it then moves on to his time in New York and the vast global stage - paintings reflecting his unique challenge to the issue of painting through his consistent artistic methodology, including recent pieces following his return to creating independent gunpowder paintings in the past few years. Evolving from black gunpowder to color gunpowder, this new stage registers the artist's unrestrained pursuit of his childhood dream to become a painter, as well as his confrontation with the integral challenges of contemporary painting. Exhibition: Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands (30.09.2016-01.05.2017).