![]() ![]() Then he sprinkles gunpowder carefully around the lines, covers the ensemble with sheets of cardboard weighed down with bricks or rocks to control the force of the explosion, and lights the fuse. Sometimes he adds foliage or garments like abayas (for Memories (2011), presented in Doha, Qatar) to the mix. The artist sketches on high-quality Japanese paper placed on the floor, often also laying down stencils he has cut out from cardboard. Since then the institute has burrowed into the artist’s oeuvre and discovered that his works are surprisingly durable.Ĭai, an energetic international traveller who is based in New York, is perhaps best known for his gunpowder drawings. “We wanted to include more contemporary artists and a more diverse range and radical use of materials,” says Rivenc, who is leading the Cai study. So far every book has centred on a US or European artist who is no longer living: Willem de Kooning, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Lucio Fontana and Hans Hofmann. The goal was to produce a book about Cai for The Artist’s Materials series issued by Getty Publications. But the organisation had a counterproposal, she says: to investigate the full range of the artist’s oeuvre, including his early, more tentative oils, transitional works, black gunpowder drawings and visceral museum installations as well as the coloured gunpowder paintings. “We thought, ‘That’s great,’” says Rachel Rivenc, an associate scientist at the institute. To find out, the Chinese-born artist contacted the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles in early 2016, asking its staff to take a look at the works that he had started making by detonating daytime fireworks on canvas the previous year. ![]() But recently Cai became curious about another uncertainty: how his coloured gunpowder paintings will hold up over time. Crucial to his process is the element of surprise: a level of uncertainty and suspense about exactly what effect his detonations will have on his works on paper, for example, or how smoke will billow in ephemeral events like his project to extend the Great Wall of China with two fuse lines. ![]() The restlessly inventive artist Cai Guo-Qiang is known for his radical experimentation with materials-especially gunpowder, which he has used to ignite his drawings and to stage explosive events outdoors for awestruck viewers around the world. ![]()
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