Gunpowder on canvas

240 × 300 cm. 94 1/2 × 118 1/8 in.

Signed in Chinese and pinyin, and dated on bottom right

LITERATURE
2021, Odyssey and Homecoming, The Forbidden City Publishing House, Beijing, p. 122-123
EXHBITED
15 Dec 2020 - 28 Feb 2021, Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming, The Palace Museum, Beijing
8 Jul 2021 - 7 Mar 2022, Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming, Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai

PROVENANCE
Important Private Collection, Asia

Conveying the Power of Nature to My Own Creation
Cai Guo-Qiang's Salute to Paul Cézanne, Reinventing Earth-Shattering Gunpowder Masterpiece

In 1999, Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard earned Cai Guo-Qiang the Venice Biennial Golden Lion Award, making him the preeminent Chinese artist in the world. In 2008, Cai held a solo retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, setting a new record for most visitors to an exhibition at the museum. In the same year, during the opening ceremony to the Beijing Summer Olympics, the artist lit up the Chinese capital with Firework Footprints of History and in 2012 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Painting Category of the Praemium Imperiale. In total, Cai has held 74 solo exhibitions at museums in 24 countries and his works have been collected by 80 art institutions at home and overseas. For more than 30 years, Cai Guo-Qiang has challenged the limits of what constitutes art and by transcending those boundaries surprised and shocked viewers in equal measure. He has taken the power of Chinese culture as symbolized by gunpowder and traversed a unique artistic path bridging the gap between East and West.

First Auction for a Peerless Work:
A Rare Museum Level Coloured Gunpowder Diptych Masterpiece Structure

In 2017, Cai Guo-Qiang launched one of his most important artistic programs in recent years Individual's Journey through Western Art History. This involved six solo exhibitions at major art museums around the world, and engaging in a creative dialogue with Western art classics at the respective museums. This dialogue ranged from Ancient Rome and Greece, to the Renaissance, Baroque period, socialist realism and the beginnings of modernism. In terms of the latter, Cai chose to engage in dialogue with Paul Cézanne “the father of modern art” and one of his most famous works Mont Sainte-Victoire. Indeed, he observed that Cézanne's depiction of the mountain in this work expressed the “essence of the object” and a “view of the cosmos that transcends time and space,” inspiring countless imitators and imbuing it with an ultimate creative freedom. Indeed, Cai has created three rare gunpowder paintings that he characterized as “a salute to Cézanne”: Cypress of Mont Sainte-Victoire, En Route, which is part of the Guardian Art Center collection, and the work for this auction Structure. In contrast to the first two pieces which depict cypress trees in the foreground, Structure is the only one of the three to show Mont Sainte-Victoire in all its glory. It is also the only work to use coloured gunpowder, highlighting its importance and uniqeness.

If we review the gunpowder paintings Cai Guo-Qiang has produced throughout his artistic career, then very few use colours other than black, white and brown. Indeed, over more than 30 years only three such works have been auctioned; In 2021, China Guardian Hong Kong sold An Ancient Tale: Kuafu Running After the Sun at auction for HKD$9.35 million, the second Peony and Dahlia No. 2 was donated by the artist for auction in 2020 and the third is Structure. Moreover, Structure is an extremely imposing painting with dimensions of 240cm x 300cm and currently the largest coloured gunpowder painting by Cai to appear on the market, making it a rare masterpiece in its own right. From 1920-1921, the work made an appearance at the Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming exhibition held at the Palace Museum in Beijing and Pudong Art Museum in Shanghai. As such, the provenance of the piece is clear and its first appearance at auction offers art lovers a rare opportunity.

Wish Fulfilled: Echo of a 30-Year Work:
Individual's Journey through Western Art History Series – A Milestone Work

Structure also represents an important milestone in Cai Guo-Qiang's more than 30-year artistic career, in the sense that it represents an exploration of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cézanne and the origins of modernist art in one of his early gunpowder paintings. The creative starting point, when Cai chose to focus on an image of Mont Sainte-Victoire, can be traced back to 1989 when he was living in Japan. At that time, he had developed a lasting interest in the origins of the universe discussed in physicist Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, particularly the Big Bang and Black Hole theories. It was as a result of these reflections that the artist came up with the Project for Extraterrestrials series, in an attempt to create a piece for an imagined other worldly audience, which led to Cai's first work exploring Western art history Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 2. This project was to be exploded on Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence, France, with a “lightning” gunpowder trail leading from the foot of the mountain to the peak, but the outbreak of a forest fire meant the project was unable to go ahead. All that was left was a gunpowder draft depicting the mountain landscape. Nevertheless, this experience established in Cai's head a desire to engage in a dialogue with Cézanne.

Thirty years later in 2019, Cai Guo-Qiang returned to the same place and walked up Mont Sainte-Victoire painted repeatedly by Cézanne during his lifetime. It was on this occasion that he used Structure to finally bring his journey through Western art history to the perfect conclusion. The piece is not only a testament to his high aesthetic attainments after many years of trial and error with coloured gunpowder painting, it has also come to be viewed as the ultimate work in his discourse on modernism with Cézanne, imbuing the work with much greater meaning.

Behold a Lofty Mountain, the Light and Shadow of Roaring Flames
When Binary Aesthetics Collide with Passionate Brilliance

Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder paintings have always ingeniously juxtaposed and combined the contradictory opposites of accidental and unstable against planning and structure. On the one hand, the artist needs to strictly control the direction of the gunpowder and the amount used to create the line rhythms he wants on the limited space of the canvas. On the other, Cai adopts a spontaneous approach to creating art that is akin to the action painting of Jackson Pollock, so he freely throws gunpowder and induces multiple trajectories, thereby hiding the unpredictable nature of the explosion and the flow of emotional awareness within the creative process. In this context, Structure perfectly represents the duality of this ingenuity.

In saluting Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, one of the most iconic works produced in the artist's later years, to some extent Cai Guo-Qiang's Structure seeks to restore the pioneering artistic expressionism of Cézanne as he moved from Post Impressionism to Cubism. The bottom of the work is filled with sonorous and forceful lines as if produced using the wrinkle method of Chinese painting, presenting viewers with a towering and undulating mountain terrain in the shape of the Chinese character “Zhi” (之). This highlights the aristocratic bearing of the mountain, utilizing a Western object to shine a light on the spirit of Eastern landscape painting. Cai uses intaglio methods to create a paper matrix which he lays across the canvas as a space to control the exploding gunpowder. He also deliberately leaves the background white, extending it with different coloured gunpowder scattered along the lines of the mountain outline. The moment the gunpowder is ignited creates a huge burst of kinetic energy, following the direction of the mountain rocks and measuring every inch of Mont Sainte-Victoire, thereby showcasing an unpredictable and graceful tension. The colour of the gunpowder replicates the light and shade created by the intermingling of blue, yellow and green in the paintings of Cézanne, vividly highlighting the marks of flowing light and shade and the sonata of contrasting colours. As a result, the destruction and construction of the explosion, the gentle colours of the gunpowder and shapes of the mountain rocks imbued with a sense of substance, objects that superficially appear diametric opposites, perfectly come together as one integrated whole, bringing to life this breathtaking painting.

Perpetual Excitement, a Giant Dragon in Flight
Interwoven Eastern and Western Aesthetic

“Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her eternity.”
—Paul Cézanne

As one of the artists most respected by Cai Guo-Qiang, Cézanne has had an important influence on the latter's artistic outlook. Cai once pointed out: “When art history reached Cézanne, he saw that the colours, shapes and motifs were all pure. The purity of Cézanne is to be found in the fact that he faced shifting events by sticking to fundamental principles. When Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire or an apple, when he painted a single object, the work encompassed a boundless world.” Cai yearned for the purity and persistence of Cézanne, and saw in his works creative freedom: “The purity I want is free and easy change.”

In Structure, Cai Guo-Qiang precisely employs the multidimensional way of looking at objects showcased in Cézanne's “architectural type paintings,” utilizing powerful structural lines to craft the outlines of mountain rocks. Moreover, this Cézanne-like method of expression “focused on essence un-impacted by the flow of light and shade” ensures that once the gunpowder colours accumulate the various mountain ridgelines can still be clearly seen. As the gunpowder explodes a series of lines are created, almost as if the pulse of nature is made real, like a giant dragon flying over the earth, suddenly transporting viewers into a world of imagination and mystery.

The artist deliberately leaves the background white as a reference to the “blank spaces” that are such an integral element of Eastern aesthetics and as a result, the coloured lines created when the gunpowder ignites are even more prominent. Indeed, the large amount of dynamic blue reproduces the splendor of Mont Sainte-Victoire, while the sky emerges multicoloured, a mixture of animated lemon-yellow, orange and light green hues. It is almost as if we are seeing moonlight spilled from a crescent moon, gathering the power of ball lightning. The different contrasting colours give rise to natural and harmonious mixtures in the same way Cézanne used the repeated accumulation of coloured blocks to showcase “changing natural essence.”

Looking Back and Forward, Wisdom and Wonder:
Eternal Life Force Leading to the Cosmos

“One could say that the spirituality of my hometown is my Mont Sainte-Victoire or is it a path to understanding the universe?”
—Cai Guo-Qiang

In the 2019 documentary Return to Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cai Guo-Qiang makes the above statement, reflecting on the fact that he sees something of Cézanne in himself. Both men are imbued with a strong desire to blaze a trail in art history and converse with the universe and similarly reflected on the inspiration provided by their native land. For Cai, the firework customs in his hometown of Quanzhou inspired his gunpowder art work: “the true essence of gunpowder is to be found in the fact that it corresponds to the strength and spirit of Mankind from the beginnings of evolution to the present, while also reflecting the features of the universe itself.” In contrast, Cézanne depicted his hometown Mont Sainte-Victoire over many years and searching for its essential spirit in the unchanging view provided him with insight into the essence of time and space, as well as the essential nature of things. This philosophical view of time and space connects to the Chinese spirit that runs through the veins of Cai Guo-Qiang and his view of the cosmos. The artist is very much aware of the great energy contained within the momentary splendor of the gunpowder, embodying on a fundamental level the power of nature and the cosmos. As such, in Structure Cai recreates nature through the power of gunpowder, leaving behind marks of winding mountain ridges, as if a repository for all time and space dialogue condensed into the eternity depicted in the painting.

Price estimate:
HKD: 6,000,000 - 9,000,000
USD: 764,300- 1,146,500

Auction Result:
HKD: --