CAI GUOQIANG (B.1957)

Cai Guo-Qiang is an internationally-recognized Chinese artist best known for his composed explosions, gunpowder drawings, and installations. Among his numerous accolades and exhibitions, Cai received the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, was the first Chinese artist to hold a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008, and served as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

His installations often involve a radical reorientation of time and history. The work featured here derives from one of Cai’s four works presented on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 2006 exhibition Transparent Monument. This piece is an ink rubbing taken from Nontransparent Monument, one of the four installations, a nine-panel green limestone narrative relief sculpture that documents recent political and cultural events, memorializing them as if they are the petty and inscrutable images of ancient history found on a cave wall.