By Alexa Olesen
It's Thursday, lunchtime, and the Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang and I are sitting huddled over a tape recorder in the cafeteria of the Whitney Museum in New York. I'm straining to hear him talk over the clatter of dishes, while also trying to make sense of his words through his strong Fujian accent.
I'm also doing my best to throw him questions that will make him squirm. But Cai is chronically affable and serene, unfazed either by the cafeteria noise or by me. The 43-year-old artist sits casually, shoulders slouching, completely at ease. Perhaps he's confident because his conceptual work has been given an entire room to itself here at the Whitney, the elitist Upper East Side institution that's considered by many to be the apex of contemporary art.
Yet Cai's piece for the Whitney Bienniale 2000 is bafflingly banal, and I wish he'd get riled by my questions and explain his latest work.
Cai has created a CD-ROM to teach people the Chinese art of Feng Shui, which literally translated means Wind and Water, and is a Chinese form of geomancy. After getting a grasp of the basic theory from watching the CD-ROM presentation, museum-goers can then purchase foot-high stone lions for $US500, $800, or $1,000. The lions, if placed strategically in a person's home, should help anyone who feels his or her oersonal yin energy field is too strong; their apartment building edges are too sharp; or because it's built a church, hospital or cemetery.
Buying the Lions
The pale grey lions for sale are tucked into numerous shallow alcoves from floor to ceiling in Cai's exhibition space. Several computers dot the walls. Visitors diligently click through their CD-ROM lessons in the art of placement, surrounded by clean white walls and bathed in a soft halogen haze. It feels like a dentist's office, but a very expensive dentist. Maybe an orthodontist.
I tell Cai it seems to me he is pawning off little stone lions for exorbitant sums and calling it art. He evades my queries effortlessly, laughing and professing sincerity.
"Ever since I was small my family has practiced Feng Shui," he says. "It is my own cultural background coming out here. Later, after I grew up, I became involved in contemporary art, which is also very concerned with the use of space. With this piece I am not trying to say you will be able to improve your your life by buying the lions, but it should make you think about your life and the way you have things organized in your life."
OK, but it's an expensive lesson. Hundreds of dollars for a mass produced statuette?
"Collectors can only buy them if they have real Feng Shui problems," Cai says, without irony.
Pile of Gunpowder
The shoebox hovels of Manhattan naturally have plenty of significant Feng Shui problems, and the lions are being snapped up at a rapid clip, replaced each time by a small photo. The photos show the stone lions in their new homes, poised next to walk-in kitchens, perched on the corner of a cluttered desk, or silhouetted by a Hudson River riew. I wonder if some of the people who bought lions did so just to get a picture of their home into the Whitney.
My disappointment in the Whitney piece, which is titled "How is your Feng Shui?", comes in part because many of Cai's other works are so wonderfully evocative.
I would like to have been present in 1993 for "Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10" when, using a long narrow pile of gunpowder he then ignited, Cai extended the line of the Great Wall into the Gansu Province desert 10,000 meters. This pyrotechnical extension to the Great Wall glowed eerily under dark of night as the fire climbed up and over dunes. He said it was for extra-terrestrials. Just like the light of distant stars, the radiating photons of Cai's piece would travel through space and maybe, hopefully, reach the eyes of a lonely E.T. out there.
Stifling and Antiseptic
Other pieces of his I'd like to have seen include "Project for Heiankyo 1200th Anniversary." For that piece, in Kyoto in 1994, Cai set fire to 1,200 liters of sake. Later, in 1998, he "blew up" the Taiwan Museum of Art. For the latter piece Cai traced a line of gunpowder through interior of the museum and out onto the exterior of the building, and lit it. He created a dramatic and refreshing multi-sensory event for a type of space that can often be stifling and antiseptic.
Most of Cai's work involves his fascination with science, magic, and shamanism. Cai grandparents were very religious and imparted to him a faith in the mystical.
"He believes there are elements of traditional Chinese culture that could really improve the lives of people in the West," says Britta Erickson, an historian of Chinese art.
Indeed, Cai's ability to create stimulating and powerful events qualify him as a contemporary art shaman, someone who is able to eloquently combine natural forces and his own cultural heritage to perform mind-expanding feats.
Yet his experiments are hit and miss.
In the case of the Whitney show, his conjuring feels like charlatanism, like selling hokey totems to the spiritually impaired. He has found an excellent market, no doubt.
