More About This Exhibition

Cai Guo-Qiang, the acclaimed Chinese-born artist known internationally for his elaborate sculpture installations and gunpowder projects, has created a site-specific exhibition for the 2006 season of The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The four works that make up "Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument" were inspired by the dramatic setting of the Roof Garden, the open-air space atop the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, and by the artist's reactions to issues of present-day concern.

The installation is made possible by a grant from Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

Additional support has been provided by Caroline Howard Hyman, Alice King and Roger King, Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen, and Robert C. Y. Wu.




More About the Works on View

"Cai is, without doubt, one of the most inventive artists working today in New York and indeed internationally, and this exhibition will mark many 'firsts' for the Metropolitan," commented Gary Tinterow, who is Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and who invited Mr. Cai to create the installation. "'Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof' will be the first solo exhibition by a contemporary Chinese artist to be held at the Metropolitan. His method of combining traditional Chinese motifs and materials to comment on contemporary life makes his work particularly relevant in the context of an encyclopedic museum, and especially moving to anyone who has been touched by the September 11, 2001, attack on New York."

Works on view include the 15-foot-tall glass Transparent Monument, at the base of which lie replicas of dead birds. "Like a transparent sculpture or canvas," says Cai, "the glass encases the city and park, fusing them with the work as one, and bringing out the relationship between the city, or civilization, and park, or nature."

A second sculpture, Nontransparent Monument, the antithesis of Transparent Monument, is a multipart narrative relief sculpture in stone replete with vignettes depicting life after September 11, 2001, that range in subject from the tragic to the humorous.

The installation also features Move Along, Nothing to See Here, a pair of lifesize replicas of crocodiles, cast in resin and pierced with several thousand sharp objects confiscated at airport-security checkpoints, which loom over the Roof Garden space.

Finally, an ephemeral sculpture, titled Clear Sky Black Cloud, consists of an actual black cloud appearing above the Roof Garden at noon on Tuesday through Sunday of each week, bursting like an inkblot in the sky and then dissipating slowly in the air. This recurring work, made from miniature black-smoke shells, sets a new and symbolic clock for New York City for the duration of the exhibition.




About the Artist

Born in 1957—the son of a historian and landscape painter in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province—Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced sigh gwo chang) developed a desire to become an artist at an early age. As a teenager, he was absorbed in the martial arts and even acted in some kung-fu movies. Educated in the traditions of Western art, Cai first encountered Western contemporary art as China entered an era of intense social change. Not able to find a school offering classes in contemporary art, he studied stage design from 1981 to 1985 at the Shanghai Drama Institute. He also experimented with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and to confront the suppression that he felt from his controlled artistic and social climate. At the end of 1986, when he moved to Japan, he began to explore the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that led to experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of explosion events, exemplified in his renowned series Projects for Extraterrestrials.

Cai achieved international prominence while living in Japan, and his works began to be shown widely around the world. His approach draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions, and materials, such as astrophysics, feng shui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, computers, vending machines, and gunpowder. Among his many awards to date is the Golden Lion Prize of the 48th Venice Biennale International. Cai moved from Japan to the United States in 1995 and now lives in New York with his family.

The artist's principal projects include Tornado: Explosion Project for the Festival of China, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., 2005; Inopportune, a four-stage exhibition presented at MASS MoCA, 2004–2005; Light Cycle, an explosion project for New York's Central Park on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, 2003; Ye Gong Hao Long: Explosion Project for Tate Modern, Tate Modern, 2003; Transient Rainbow, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Flying Dragon in the Heavens, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark, 1997; The Earth Has Its Black Hole Too, Hiroshima, Japan, 1995; and Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, Jiayuguan City, China, 1993. He also curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.




Exhibition Organizers

The curators for "Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument" are Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge, and Anne L. Strauss, associate curator, both of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibition design is by Daniel Kershaw, senior exhibition designer, with graphics by Sue Koch, senior graphic designer, both of the Museum's Design Department.




The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden opened to the public in 1987. Annual installations have featured selections of modern sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum's collection and, most recently, presentations of works by the artists Ellsworth Kelly (1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999), David Smith (2000), Joel Shapiro (2001), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (2002), Roy Lichtenstein (2003), Andy Goldsworthy (2004), and Sol LeWitt (2005).

The Cantor Roof Garden is open to the public this year from April 25 through October 29, weather permitting. Sandwiches and beverage service—including espresso, cappuccino, iced tea, soft drinks, wine, and beer—are available at the Roof Garden daily from 10:00 a.m. until closing.