CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/18/2021

Cosmic space and transforming creativity in 'Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming'

Featured spreads are from Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming, the new release from DelMonico Books, published to accompany the major traveling exhibition currently on view in Shanghai. “Cai’s prolific career has been about breaking barriers, those separating two-dimensional painting from multi-dimensional live events,” Simon Schama writes. “He has painted with fire and smoke, the fugitive moment of an explosion fixed in imprinted marks and strokes. Spectacularly documented here, it has also been a refutation of the assumption that voyaging purposefully presupposes an abandonment of origins. There is no zero-sum game here between home and away. Chinese roots, Japanese flowering, Western burgeoning are all part of the same organic growth, perennially ramifying. In a world turning inwards, agitated by chauvinist suspicion, Cai’s art faces outward.” Schama later concludes, “I believe that art which engages with the great, serious matters of our condition, and that of the earth we inhabit, is more needed than ever before. If, among the winnowings brought about by the pandemic, there is a discarding of the cheaply fashionable, the gaudily meretricious to make space for profound reflectiveness, then that is all to the good. And among the work that will endure and not just beyond our present plight, will be that of Cai Guo-Qiang. His 'odyssey and homecoming' is, of course, a triumphant conquest over cultural defensiveness; but when we experience his art, we travel somewhere further still: into the cosmic space where crass matter perishes and transforming creativity is born.”