Cai Guo-Qiang, Memory, Energy Transferral and Catastrophe

This a long one, my apologies in advance. Frankly, a good deal of the information presented is contextual, as I am unsure of the degree of familiarity many of you have with the Chinese artistic tradition. It does relate to catastrophe though on some level, I assure you. It just takes a bit of time to get there.

Some time after posting that photo of Guadalcanal, I got to thinking about catastrophe in very rudimentary terms. Specifically, I began to consider the nature of all things that we consider catastrophic and came to the conclusion that at their most basic, they are all forms of energy transferral. Energy is transferred during a catastrophe in a number of ways: physically, chemically, through radioactive emissions and so on. This issue of energy transferral reminded me of an artist whose work I particularly enjoy, Cai Guo-Qiang. In essence, I would like to briefly discuss some of his works, which I believe may be framed as controlled "micro-catastrophes," and see if anything can be gleaned from them on the broader nature of catastrophe in the context of the "macro-catastrophes" around which the class has been structured.

The specific aspect of Cai's oeuvre that I'd like to discuss are his gunpowder drawings and potentially some his "social projects."* The creation of a gunpowder drawing entails the laying of cardboard stencils, fuses and powder over hemp paper. Wood is layered on top of these to control the dispersal of smoke and localize the explosion. All of the above are then weighted down with rocks and detonated by Cai, typically using a stick of incense.

There is a relationship between this mode of production and Daoist conceptions of art. Traditionally, the relationship of the viewer with the image in the Chinese context is not linear, as in Europe and North America**, but circular. It is an exchange of qi between the viewer and the image, with the image itself being a vessel of its creator's qi, under the tradition of biji. This tradition, translated as "trace of brush," encapsulates the belief that the artist is present within the image. The act of painting is thus the act of projecting oneself onto a medium. I would argue that the act of gunpowder drawing is analogous. The incense acts as a medium between the artist's body and the paper for the transferral of energy from body to surface.

Cai's first gunpowder drawing, Self-Portrait: A Subjugated Soul (1986), is a direct engagement with both biji and "spirit-resonance." First coined by Xie He***, who codified what was to be considered desirable in Chinese art for millennia, this term refers to the desirability of capturing the spiritual essence of the subject over physical mimesis. The volatility of gunpowder as a material is indexical of Cai's inner turmoil during this period.

From here, I would like to diverge from my discussion of art into one on catastrophe. Finally. If a catastrophe, is indeed a transferral of energy, do catastrophes have "spirit resonance?" In the case of disasters involving radiation, the answer is self evidently yes. Nuclear meltdowns and detonations irradiate the environment for decades after they occur, causing the catastrophe to linger. But what of the image of Guadalcanal? The site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War, though a seemingly quaint tropical paradise in the photo that I posted, skull aside. Without knowledge of the Second World War, it generally appears to be a good vacation spot. Sans skull. I'm thus tempted to say that we as human beings are the spirit of the disaster, it requires us to propagate.

In the above sentence, I have deliberately broken with the convention that I established earlier of resonance, by using the term propagate instead. I've done this as I've been racked with illness on more than one occasion the past couple of weeks, and this has given me the opportunity to consider what I would term the viral nature of catastrophe. In my experience, I have found that mass coverage of catastrophe doesn't negate the importance of catastrophe so much as free it from needing to occur. Blanchot particularly piqued my interest in this respect. The constant media coverage of disasters of all shapes and sizes occurring in a broad geographical space is internalized by us. To borrow from Christopher's post, when the New York Times reports on the disastrous impact of tainted hamburger meat on one young woman, the seemingly innocuous act of food preparation becomes tainted with the potential for catastrophe. When one's body is invaded by a virus, it reproduces by inserting rogue strands of DNA into the nuclei of the host's cells. I would argue, in a vaguely Jungian sense, that we are all carriers of the metaphorical DNA of hundreds of catastrophes transcending time and geography.

On the other hand, returning to Cai, perhaps the catastrophe's spirit is not of destruction. I would additionally argue that it is not one of rejuvenation either. One Maoist slogan of the Cultural Revolution was "no destruction, no construction." When a gunpowder drawing is created, nothing in the traditional sense has been constructed. But nothing has been destroyed. As any student of rudimentary chemistry will tell you, when a chemical reaction occurs energy may be released in myriad forms, but mass is conserved as a constant. The gunpowder may no longer be in its initial state, but it is still all there. Perhaps at their most simple, catastrophes are reconfigurations of mass initiated by a violent outburst of energy. Cai's The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century (1995-1998) illustrates this. Here he has painted a lingzhi mushroom, used to detoxify in traditional medicine, and stylized it as a mushroom cloud, balancing both rejuvenation and destruction.**** Perhaps we can thus say that the catastrophe is in fact a balanced and self-negating event. Considering this, a catastrophe needn't leave behind a wasteland or gleaming Haussmannised metropolis in order to resonate.

I feel like I've said a lot without reaching any definite conclusion. Feel free to gift me with your feedback.

*The relationship between Cai and the catastrophic is relatively evident here, considering that the namesake of these large scale works has its roots in the Cultural Revolution.

**I stress the term "traditionally" here, as this relationship has grown increasingly complicated in both contexts.

***Other literati painters who have written extensively on this concept are Guo Xi and Gu Kaizhi.

****Not to mention culture and intellectualism with violence and barbarism.