Retrospective of the Work of the Chinese Artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim Museum

Organized by Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, and Alexandra Munroe, the museum’s senior curator of Asian art, this exhibition nearly fills the museum and introduces a conceptually inclined impresario best known for works using gunpowder.

Cai Guo-Qiang is internationally acclaimed as an artist whose creative transgressions and cultural provocations have literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time.
This is especially true of Inopportune: Stage One, Cai’s largest installation to date, which presents nine real cars in a cinematic progression that simulates a car bombing, occupying the central atrium of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda.

Since Mr. Cai emerged in the late 1980s and early ’90s, his work has often been seen as pure and above the market. It is lauded for its emphasis on collective activity and its expansion of the principles of appropriation, and in fact its populist thrust and often ephemeral nature can make it a welcome antidote to the world of saleable art objects, commercial galleries and auctions.

Link Via [New York Times]