The Ninth Wave, Cai Guo Qiang
I haven’t posted on here in a while, but I thought I’d return to share a few things I’ve been experiencing while in Shanghai. Fall is here in full and it’s quickly turning into winter. I’m excited to continue exploring a few things happening in the city.
Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese New York-based artist, just wrapped up a solo-exhibit at the Power Station of Art. The venue is a former power plant repurposed in 2012 to exhibit contemporary art from mainland China. The museum itself is a work of art and in many ways serves as an intermediary between art and life, function and aesthetic.
In that regard, it’s almost the perfect setting for Guo-Qiang’s exhibition, which aims to address contemporary environmental and ecological problems through Eastern philosophical and aesthetic values.
The Ninth Wave kicked off when the installation piece, a large wooden ship filled with stuffed animals in various states of distress, set sail from Guo-Qiang’s native city of Guangzhou and docked on the bank of the Huangpu river right outside the Power Station of Art. I think the ship was inspired by the painting of the same name by Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky, which depicts sailors clinging desperately to boat wreckage after a storm. The animals seem to exhibit the same distress as the subjects of the painting, except they’re reeling from the ravages of mankind rather than the forces of nature.
The most interesting display to me, though, was titled Silent Ink. The exhibit was a 250-square meter lake dug out of a large open space. In the backdrop, piles of cement rubble and rebar mimic rolling mountain hills. In the center of the lake, a constant stream of jet-black ink flows like a waterfall from a spout mounted on the ceiling of the space. For those that have seen a construction site in China, (they’re hard to miss) the setting was a familiar one. But the tranquility and peace of this exhibit, furthered by the sounds of a trickling waterfall and hushed exchanges between exhibit-goers, turns a ubiquitous scene of destruction and wreckage into a serene and unsettling one. The entire experience was heightened by the pernicious smell of the ink. Signs warn more sensitive attendees with delicate olfactory senses to take caution.
I typically find it hard to connect with contemporary art unless I have a context for understanding it. The thought that art can exist on its own in a vacuum has never resonated strongly with me. Rather than observe and craft meaning based on our own subjective experience, I’ve sought to understand art within a larger framework outside of the viewer of what the author seeks to communicate and how it embodies the zeitgeist. But in a time when society and culture is becoming increasingly fragmented, (in the good kind of way) that might be a difficult practice.
