LED-Exploding Cars and Gun Powder Art

I checked out the last day of Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibit at the Guggenheim in NYC, the exhibit is best known for the suspended cars with LED pole lights coming out of them, but I think gun powder-exploded canvases were my favorite, I’d like to try to make some of those outside the city limits of course… more photos here & a write up of the exhibit + video.

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.

On January 18, 2008, a team consisting of the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, members of his studio, full-time staff, and temporary installation crews of the Guggenheim Museum’s Curatorial, Art Services and Preparations, Registrar, Conservation, Fabrications, Construction, Multimedia, Lighting, and Exhibition Management departments began the month-long installation of Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe. The images here represent the technically challenging task of installing four of the exhibition’s works: Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (1998), a suspended fishing boat pierced with approximately 3,000 arrows; Head On (2006), an arc of 99 life-size replicas of wolves that appear to be leaping head on into a glass wall; Inopportune: Stage One (2004), a series of nine cars, some of which are suspended from the top of the museum’s rotunda; and New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard (2008), a series of approximately 70 life-size sculptures.