Cai Guo-Qiang Gunpowder Art Symposium

Cai Guo-Qiang Gunpowder Art Symposium, 24th October 2019 at the Ashmolean Museum Celebrating the opening of the Cai Guo-Qiang Gunpowder Art exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum a symposium with experts from the Ashmolean, the University of Oxford, eminent art historians, as well as the artist himself was held on the 24th of October 2019. Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) is, is an internationally established artist who has lived, worked and exhibited around the world. He is best known as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he treated awestruck viewers to possibly the greatest fireworks show in history. His practice ranges over painting and drawing, video, installation and performance. Please Note: Not all talks in the conference were filmed.

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Episodes

Conference Programme (Other Resource)

Conference Programme for the conference.

Jan 17, 2020

Art History and Museum as Medium

Cai Guo-Qiang, Artist, gives the eighth and final presentation in the symposium. Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) is, quite literally, one of the world’s most ground-breaking artists. He is best known as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he treated awestruck viewers to possibly the greatest fireworks show in history. His practice ranges over painting and drawing, video, installation and performance. The As...

Jan 13, 2020•38 min

In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii

Jerome Neutres, Independent Curator, gives the seventh talk in the symposium. Jerome Neutres is an independent curator, who earlier in 2019 curated the exhibition In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. He is the former director of La Reunion des Musees Nationaux Grand Palais and former president of the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris.

Jan 13, 2020•16 min

Cai Guo-Qiang: In Search of El Greco

Saul Nelson, Ruskin School of Art, DPhil Candidate, gives the sixth presentation in the symposium. The talk will be considering Cai's work of that title in the exhibition in the light of affinities between his work and El Greco's, arguing that both artists pursue painting as a medium that captures the invisible. Saul Nelson is a third-year DPhil candidate at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. Saul works on post- war modernist art, with an emphasis on migration, and his work has been published i...

Jan 13, 2020•11 min

Yi 羿 - Myth: Shooting the Suns

Paul Bevan, Ashmolean Museum, Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting, gives the sixth presentation in the symposium. Arrows, fire, and gunpowder were all central to the art of war in pre-modern China and aspects concerning these will be briefly introduced in this talk as they relate to the art work, 'Myth: Shooting the Suns' by Cai Guo-Qiang. Paul Bevan is the Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, and has taught modern Chinese literature and history at Oxford, Cambridge...

Jan 13, 2020•13 min

Two Gunpowder Drawings and Cai Guo-Qiang in Japan

Lena Fritsch, Ashmolean Museum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, gives the fourth presentation in the symposium. Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, working on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions of international art. Recent exhibitions include A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (2019) and Ibrahim El Salahi: A Sudanese Artist in Oxford (2018). One of her main research areas is Japanese art and photography; recent monographs include Ravens an...

Jan 13, 2020•17 min

Cai Guo-Qiang and the Depths of Spectacle

David Taylor, University of Oxford, Associate Professor of English, gives the third presentation in the symposium. In this paper I'll suggest some of the ways in which Cai's art, and his explosion events especially, counters a tradition of critical and philosophical suspicion of spectacle that goes back (in the West) some two and half thousand years. In order to make this claim, I'll first trace Cai's relationship to the theatre and the manner in which his art addresses questions of what perform...

Jan 13, 2020•26 min

Context and Influence in Cai Guo-Qiang's Work

David Eliott, Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, Vice Director and Senior Curator, gives the second talk for the symposium. Abstract: Beginning with the context of Shanghai in the late 1970s- early '80s where Cai Guo-Qiang studied, I will consider briefly the early influences on his work including that of Russian/Soviet art as well those of his contemporaries and the prevailing cultural discourse in the city. I shall then consider - again briefly - the periodicity of Cai Guo-Qiang's ...

Jan 13, 2020•36 min

Welcome and Introduction

Shelagh Vainker, Curator of Chinese Art and Exhibition Curator, gives the first talk in the symposium.

Jan 13, 2020•5 min

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