All About Qatar Tourism: Cai Guo-Qiang Saraab in Mathaf Doha Qatar

Cai Guo-Qiang Saraab in Mathaf Doha Qatar

December 5, 2011 - May 26, 2012

Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab showcases Cai’s diverse body of work, ranging from his signature gunpowder drawings to large-scale site-specific installations and the explosion event of Black Ceremony. Cai Guo-Qiang’s biggest exhibition since I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim Museum in 2008, Saraab (“mirage”) will feature more than fifty works, including sixteen newly commissioned pieces, thirty recent works and nine documentary videos.

Saraab continues Mathaf’s commitment to present an Arab perspective on modern and contemporary art as it turns eastward to consider dynamics across Asia for the first time. Works on view explore the historic and contemporary iconography of the Arabian Gulf and its seafaring culture, as well as the Islamic history of Quanzhou. They also address the ambiguity of Qatar and China’s relationships to one another, and Cai’s own creative development over a lifetime. In keeping with its title, Saraab questions whether there is something illusory or unobtainable about the process of cultural, temporal and geographic translation.

See here more http://www.mathaf.org.qa/mathaf_cai_commission.html

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, and
was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy.

His work has since crossed multiple mediums within art, including drawing, installation, video and performance art.

While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his signature explosion events.

Drawing upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, these projects and events aim to establish an
exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them, utilizing a site specific approach to culture and history.

Cai was awarded the Japan Cultural Design Prize in 1995; the Golden Lion at the
48th Venice Biennale in 1999; the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), New England, for Best Installation or Single Work in a Museum in 2005; the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007; the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2009; and AICA’s first place for Best Project in a Public Space for Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms in 2010.

Among his many solo exhibitions and projects include Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof:

Transparent Monument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2006; Transient Rainbow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2002; and APEC Cityscape Fireworks Show at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Shanghai, in 2001.

He also curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005,
and held the distinguished position as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

More recently, Cai’s retrospective I Want to Believe opened at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2008 before traveling to the National Art
Museum of China in Beijing in 2008 and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2009. In 2010, Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis opened as the inaugural exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.

Cai also created Odyssey, a permanent gunpowder drawing installation for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2010.

Installed as part of the museum's ongoing Portal Project, it is one of his largest
gunpowder drawings to date. Another solo exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang – 1040M
Underground, is on view at the new foundation IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural

Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine through November 2011.
In December 2011, Cai’s solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab at Mathaf: Arab
Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar will be his first ever in the Middle East.

Cai currently lives and works in New York.

See more in his website http://www.caiguoqiang.com/

Cai Guo-Qiang

Exhibitions saraab in Mathaf Qatar

miniature series

miniature series

The miniature Series includes eight gunpowder drawings commissioned by Mathaf especially for Doha. In a creative process open to the public, volunteers prepared and cut stencils and fabric samples. Gunpowder was then ignited directly onto the stencils and samples to transfer the designs to paper. Inspired by Islamic miniature paintings and the embroidered trim on Qatari women's abayas, the richly decorative designs in Miniature Series question the roles of ornament in art, creation in destruction, and the artist as the sole creator of an artwork.

Pictured above: Desert Hues (2011), Gunpowder on paper, mounted on wood as seven-panel screen 230 x 542.5 x 2.8 cm (90 9/16 x 213 9/16 x 1 1/8 in.), Commissioned by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio