Gunpowder and oil on canvas

180 x 125 cm. 70 7/8 × 49 1/4 in.

Signed in Chinese and English, dated on bottom right; Signed and located in Chinese on the reverse

LITERATURE
1987, Art Magazine October Issue, China Artist Association, Beijing, p.65
2002, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phaidon Press Limited, New York, p.45
2006, Christie's 20 Years Hong Kong – 20th Century Chinese Art and Asian Contemporary Art Highlights, Christie's Auction House, Hong Kong, p.80
2007, Art Asia Pacific Issue 53, Art Asia Pacific Publishing LLC, Hong Kong, p.80
PROVENANCE
14 Oct 2001, Christie's Taipei Autumn Auction, Lot 45
Acquired directly by important present Asian collector from the above

Beginning a Cosmic Adventure - A Never Ending Pursuit Claration of Art
‘An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun' - A Rare Masterpiece from Cai Guoqiang

‘On foot
I had to cross the solar system
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
I sense myself already.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
shaking in the void, from it stream sparks
into other intemperate hearts.'
——Renowned Russian writer Edith Söderg
“On Foot I Had to Cross the Solar System”

Transcending History and Self – The Backbone of 30 Years of Art

Over the past 30 years, Cao Guoqiang has held almost 70 solo exhibitions of gunpowder art in more than 40 cities and 24 countries. In that period, his works have been collected by museums and important art institutions at home and overseas, and he is the first modern Chinese artist to feature in art history textbooks in the US. Cai has also repeatedly transcended the influence of the earlier modern Chinese artists. For example, in 2006 he became the youngest artist to ever hold a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and two years later was the first Chinese artist to hold a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That exhibition attracted 350,000 visitors, a record for a solo exhibition by a single artist at the museum that stood until 2016. The following year, Cai became only the second living artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid in 200 years, the first being Cy Twombly. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the whole world, the artist has used AI technology to present a “virtual bang” and retrospective exhibition at the Forbidden City Palace Museum in Beijing. However, despite Cai's extensive travels the core essence of his artistic creations remains focused on home. He has taken the Eastern aesthetics and self restraint that are an integral part of his being and presented them to the world.

In December 1986, Cai left home to make a living in Japan and took with him several of the gunpowder paintings he considered most important. One of those pieces was An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun, a blockbuster work we are extremely proud to present as part of this year's spring auction. This story underscores the artist's sentimental attachment to the painting and its importance. At the same time, this piece was the third largest of Cai's first six gunpowder canvas paintings produced from 1984 to his departure for Japan and the only one with a mythical motif, making it one of a kind.

Unsurpassed: A Rare GunpowderPainting with a Mythical Motif from the 1980s

Cai Guoqiang has on many occasions spoken of his indescribable infatuation with painting and it is because of this that the draft works for his pyrotechnic programs are often exquisitely detailed. In 2015, Cai took works considered gunpowder sketches after the 1991 Primeval Fireball exhibition in Tokyo and divided them into “Gunpowder Sketches” and “Gunpowder Paintings.” For example, those works involving outdoor pyrotechnics were classified as “sketches” and the rest as paintings. This makes the aforementioned six gunpowder paintings from the 1980s even more invaluable, in the sense that they exist as an independent branch of Cai's creative development over the past three decades. Moreover, their absolute distinctiveness, importance and sincere emotional expression directly impacted and defined Cai Guoqiang's all important personalized artistic language.

Of the six “Quanzhou Period” gunpowder paintings, onlycKuafu Running After the Sun is rooted in “Chinese mythology,” an important source that informed the artist's cultural enlightenment. In this work, we can see the mature trial efforts of Cai Guoqiang to use gunpowder in his paintings, but the piece also reflects his aesthetic ideas and humanist sentiment. As such, it can be viewed as the opening salvo in his ongoing exploration of the cosmos. Indeed, it is this quality that makes the painting a museum-standard work and important starting point for Cai's reflections on life dimensions, cosmic space, personal “essence, energy and spirit.” The painting first appeared on the market in 2001 and has been part of the collection of an important Asian collector for the past 20 years, making its auction this spring a rare and unmissable event for art lovers everywhere.

Endless Pursuit – A View of The Cosmos That Builds on the Past and Looks to the Future

During my time in Quanzhou the yellow gunpowder I first used came from firecrackers. Although that was a little dangerous and mistakes in adding sulfur and realgar could easily lead to explosions, when I look at that gunpowder now it is really fresh and beautiful and many museums around he world would like to have these earlier works as part of their collections. In ‘An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun' I took a Chinese myth that incorporates ideas about the cosmos and the sun and turned it into one of my earliest works.
——Cai Guoqiang

The composition of An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun is bizarre, with a vertical surface, serving as the horizon akin to Pan Gu settling the chaos of the universe into Heaven and Earth. On the right of the work, a huge sun takes up a great deal of space which Cai first depicts with oil painting pigments before then scattering yellow gunpowder on the surface while it is still half-wet/half-dry. The act of igniting the gunpowder subversively creates a real world blast and depending on the strength of the explosion the oil colors on the painting undergo different degrees of substantive change and curling. As such, viewers see a scorching sun streak across the heavens, with an eye-catching figure in close pursuit.

The story of “Kuafu Running After the Sun” is the first myth recorded in the Book of Changes. Indeed, this tale conveys a Chinese life-dialectic developed over Millennia: “out of the depth of misfortune comes bliss, life and motion in endless contradiction.” Moreover, Cai Guoqiang constructs his view of the universe as harmony in diversity on the basis of this invisible “Qi”: “My universe contains the exploration of space by modern cosmical physics, the Earth, nature and life, but also traditional Chinese geomancy, Chinese medicine, Qigong and supernatural spirits, these are all parts of the cosmos.”

In An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun, the rushing figure of Kuafu explains “Self cultivation in life is as never ending as the path of Kuafu chasing the sun. Every arrival is nothing more that an interim victory.” The artist uses the limited space available to profoundly elucidate his ultimate life values and his embrace of Chinese civilization and philosophy. In addition, the unique destructiveness of gunpowder and the uncertainty that comes from being unable to completely control it, not only facilitates a break with the fixed expressive impasse of traditional media, it also represents a revolt against the oppression and closed environment of the era in which it exists. In other words, this represents an important artistic declaration from the artist, highlighting the true character of “freedom first” and the ceaseless pursuit of artistic ideals.

The Dramatic Resonance of East and West Combined
Generally, Kuafu is depicted running on flat ground as he chases the sun, but in Cai Guoqiang's painting that scenario is subverted as the artist effectively declares the scene to not belong to the every day world in which we live. Instead it takes place in outer space where there is no gravity, with a full view of the cosmos as a backdrop. As such, even if a heavenly body appears on fire like a blazing sun, it is still just one point on a vast horizon and when we compare this to the figure of Kuafu it highlights his fearlessness as the wind and lightning. This ingenious reversal brings to mind Marcel Duchamps' 1200 Sacks of Coal at the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism. The sacks hung over the heads of visitors and thereby subverted all narrative structure constructed on commonsense. In addition, the dramatic tension created in the work also makes one think of the Greek artist “El Greco” from the Spanish Renaissance who Cai adored from a young age. When we look at An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun, whether the pitch black background, the momentum-imbued composition or the vertical stretched painting, the artist's respect for El Greco is clear. Despite the fact that the subject matter is a traditional Chinese myth and the material an ancient Chinese invention, the artistic thinking, logic and visual aesthetic is undeniably modern and Western. Intriguingly, the natural and seamless combination of these elements in the work creates its own dramatic resonance.

An Historical Guide to Inheriting the Past and Ushering in the Future
Another element of the work is the juxtaposition of the huge sun and comparatively insignificant figure of Kuafu, because when the explosive is ignited the radial round shape created in the combination of oil colors and gunpowder forms a stable structure in the moment. The golden yellow hue proclaims the surging energy of the sun and Cai uses concise shapes, contrasting colored surfaces and dots, to precisely capture the spiritual importance of object images. Cai Guoqiang, who is currently as home because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, has also presented his notes from the 1980s to the 1990s to demonstrate his particular feeling for the different dialogues with the sun established through his works. At the same time, he has published on Instagram six sun-chasing works, the development of which takes Kuafu Running After the Sun as their starting point, including “Project for Extraterrestrials No. 21 Myth-Shooting the Suns” (1994) and “Impression Oil Drawings:Shot the Sun” (2001). This makes it easier to appreciate the importance of An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun as inheriting the past and ushering in the future.

In the painting it is not a major leap to view the long thin body and almost transparent limbs of Kuafu as a self-projection of the artist, the protracted pursuit in the painting and the “expected future beauty” showcased in the sought after moment of explosion driving him ever forward. In 2017, Cai launched a project titled “One Person's Western Art History Journey” recording his use of gunpowder on canvas and paper in different places around the world and his exchanges across space and time with the great figures of art history. The gunpowder paintings that started with An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun once again guided Cai Guoqiang to the freedom of painting and encouraged him to accept the never ending pursuit of art.

Price estimate:
HKD: 5,800,000 – 8,800,000
USD: 747,900 – 1,134,800

Auction Result:
HKD: 9,350,000