Cai Guo-Qiang

Falling Back to Earth

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Cai Guo-Qiang was a relative unknown when he first exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1996, part of The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial. However, prior to the opening, his explosion project blew up in the gunpowder factory and Cai and senior gallery staff had to run for their lives. Undeterred, in 1999, for The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, he launched a fleet of burning boats into the Brisbane River, but they sank without a performative trace. Cai accepts the risk of failure with the nature of his artwork (although two such significant and public failures were not without embarrassment). ‘Third time lucky’,¹ he said, as he and the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) set out on an even more ambitious journey—to mount his first solo exhibition in Australia—Falling Back to Earth—which opened in November 2013.

Cai returned to QAGOMA with a significant international reputation. The ambitious scale of his work lends itself to contemporary art as spectacle, and thus the exhibition fits well with the use of the GOMA building since it opened in late 2006. Falling Back to Earth is a holistic and immersive art experience that comprises three major installations that straddle the ground level of GOMA.

Heritage is an artificial waterhole with some 170,000 tonnes of water surrounded by 99 exotic animals. Just over life size, and patently unreal in their realisation, tigers, buffalo, antelopes, giraffes, kangaroos and zebra drink, improbably, together and peaceably.

The animals, made from goat skin in Cai’s home town in China, have an, at times, very odd rendition—the kangaroos are decidedly foreign (made, as they were, by people who had never seen one). The result, however, is beautiful—a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Head On, 2006. 99 life-sized replicas of wolves and glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and hide, dimensions variable. Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG. Photograph Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Eucalyptus, 2013. Spotted gum (Corymbia maculata), wooden stools, paper and pencils, Length 3150cm (approx.) Commissioned for the exhibition Falling Back to Earth, 2013. Photograph Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.