What were all these sick animals—lions, wolves, camels, monkeys, gazelles, pandas, and zebras—doing on this dilapidated Chinese fishing boat, sailing past the famous frieze of colonial banks, trading houses, and clubs that make up Shanghai’s Bund? The city’s glass skyline of Pudong skyscrapers on the other side of the river only made this barnacle encrusted, almost Biblical ark filled with slumped, submissive creatures look more misplaced. No wonder the people on shore were perplexed. Why had Shanghai, a city recklessly proud of its miracle of modernity, allowed such a lugubrious, retrograde float to be paraded down its figurative main street? And where was this ship of the damned, loaded with broken-down animals, headed?
As it turned out, the city had not actually approved the boat’s voyage, and its destination was a dock next to the Power Station of Art, an old coal-fired power plant that’s been transformed into the enormous Museum of Contemporary Art. Here, it would be installed as the signature work in the new solo exhibit of the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang. One of China’s best known and most globally celebrated artists, Cai was about to take over the museum for a retrospective of his drawings, sculptures, videos, paintings, installations, and signature gunpowder drawings. The show is titled “The Ninth Wave,” after an oil painting from 1850 by the Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky, which depicts human survivors clinging to the wreckage of a sailing ship in a storm-tossed sea. While this work suggests man’s helplessness in the face of nature’s relentless power, Cai’s exhibit suggests an ironic thematic reversal: nature’s state of helplessness in the face of modern man’s relentless, Promethean drive to progress.
Cai is quick to insist that he does not see himself as someone using art as a didactic “tool.” After all, in China it is risky for an artist or intellectual to be too explicitly political, as Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo bitterly learned. Although Cai has been more indirect in his approach, he has made no secret of the fact that he cares deeply about real-world issues, especially the global environment. But, like other Chinese artists and intellectuals who want to work within the boundaries of their own society without ending up under detention, much less in exile, he’s walking that difficult path between artistic truth and the good graces of the Party. In China, this is a high-wire act, requiring artists to maneuver within the confines of invisible but very real political walls that are ever expanding and contracting. Since environmental protection is one critically important realm in which the Party finds its interests overlapping—to some degree, at least—with those of independent writers, artists, intellectuals, and non-governmental actors, Cai has been able to push boundaries. His current exhibit (which runs through October 28th) is designed to remind viewers of their inextricable relationship to nature, a connection that he views as having been lost as China and the world have rushed headlong to develop.
The show kicked off with several tons of Cai’s fireworks being released from a barge on the Huangpu River, producing patterns in smoke that suggested flowers, trees, mountains, and birds. It is hard to imagine any other artist in China receiving permission for such an opening, which required a temporary halting of boat traffic on the busy river. But because Cai has so often shown abroad in museums such as the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has acquired enough international stature to be indulged in China. (Cai now lives in New York.) It is often only after an artist becomes what the Chinese call “gold-plated” abroad that he or she is embraced at home, sometimes even by the Party. This pattern suggests how important Western respect and deference still are, even in a resurgent China.
On the second floor of the Power Station of Art’s Great Hall is a nearly hundred-foot-long panoramic painting, “The Bund Without Us_,_” depicting Shanghai’s fabled riverfront reclaimed by nature and roaming with wild animals several hundred years after human beings have inexplicably vanished. Cai says that the work, which is rendered in his signature medium of gunpowder ignited on paper and brush, “conjures the spirit in the literati paintings” of an earlier era, “when people live humbly and in harmony with nature, an ideal that stands in opposition to the way in which people interact with nature now.”
Perhaps the most haunting room in this new show is dedicated to “Silent Ink,” an installation that captures Cai’s indirect but powerful approach to artistic messaging. Somehow, he won permission from the museum’s director, Gong Yan, to excavate a large convex depression in the thick concrete floor of one of the former power plant’s huge upstairs rooms, and then to fill it with thousands of gallons of the pitch-black ink used for traditional calligraphy and brush painting. An overhead nozzle shoots jets of ink down into the pool, creating both a soothing waterfall-like sound and strange patterns on the glistening surface of the black “pond.” And finally, around this interior excavation, Cai has piled up all the concrete rubble and bent steel rebar, jack-hammered out of the floor, to look something like mountains in a classical landscape painting.
“Silent Ink” harkens back to the traditional landscapes with calligraphy that influenced Cai as a boy watching his father, Cai Ruiqin, paint. But it also echoes one of his best-known other works, “Heritage,” in which he arrayed a veritable U.N. of ninety-nine animals from all continents drinking peacefully together around a tranquil blue pond. Even without animals, the point in “Silent Ink” is hardly lost: China’s reality is that many lakes and rivers have been so polluted that they are too toxic even for industrial use, never mind for animals to drink. With “Silent Ink” (think “Silent Spring”), Cai has subtly connected traditional Chinese landscape painting, in which nature was always represented as ascendant over man, to our modern world, where man has become ascendant over nature. For centuries, landscape painters have depicted human beings as minute figures, often in passive contemplation, amid the grandness of nature. Their seemingly inferior positions suggested that man was not only an inescapable part of nature but also that his proper attitude toward it should be one of respectful humility. Other kinds of human intrusion in these traditional paintings usually involved no more than a small boat, a delicate pagoda, a miniscule bridge, or the faint outlines of a thatched hut. Man’s idealized angle of repose in this natural world was accommodating, not challenging; his role was to fit into it rather than to transform it for his own purposes.
As a young boy raised by a traditionalist father, Cai was steeped in classical painting’s notion of the inseparability of all forms of life. He is now reaching back to that form with nostalgia, while also updating it to reflect current realities. When traditional landscape painting was still ascendant, the Chinese did not yet fully possess the ambition to dominate their natural world and exploit its resources. This change came only after the example of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, when Europeans became captivated by a new dynamism and a mania for industrial production. Soon enough, the Chinese, too, became obsessed with gaining sufficient “wealth and power” to defend their country against the imperial predations of Japan and the West. Henceforth, they also began to strive to place themselves not in nature but above it. This change revealed itself starkly after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949. In socialist-realist landscapes of the time, artists often still started with traditional scenes of mountains and water—the Chinese term for “landscape paintings” is literally “mountains and water”—but then insinuated into them high-tension lines, factories belching smoke, bulldozers, or dam projects with brigades of stalwart proletarians, toiling with revolutionary zeal to transform the natural landscape.
Cai, who is fifty-six years old, lived through this period and then saw a critical global shift, as many Chinese began to reexamine and reassess the costs of reckless and unsustainable industrial development. Even as he has become a modern-art phenomenon, Cai has seemed to find a new satisfaction in embracing aspects of traditional Chinese culture that lay latent within him, almost like recessive genes, during earlier periods of artistic experimentation. But, with his own growing concern for environmentalism, he now finds these genes starting to express themselves in the form of a new respect for traditional naturalism. This new focus is certainly timely, because nowhere have the environmental costs of development been more alarmingly evident than in China as it has become “the industrial factory to the world.”
Paramount among all the global environmental challenges is, of course, climate change, a threat largely caused by the emission of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Now that China has become the world’s most prolific producer of heat-trapping gasses, particularly from coal-fired power plants, it is fitting that Cai’s “The Ninth Wave” is being shown in the former power station that houses China’s first state-funded museum of contemporary art. To complete the irony, the power plant’s towering but now vestigial brick chimney, which once emitted millions of tons of CO2, has now been adorned with a huge neon thermometer that measures elevating temperatures on the outside. Inside, it has been transformed into a museum gallery. Here, Cai has hung a children’s swing on which he has seated three demented-looking babies, silently arcing back and forth in the cavernous chimney. This haunting work is called “Air of Heaven,” as if the toxic fumes that were once injected from the plant into the atmosphere were now somehow engaged in emitting celestial aromas. If the three mutant babies represent mankind’s generations to come, one would have to conclude that Cai’s vision of our environmental future is dark indeed.
