Cai Guo-Qiang Gunpowder Art Symposium

Art History and Museum as Medium

Cai Guo-Qiang, Artist, gives the eighth and final presentation in the symposium. Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) is, quite literally, one of the world’s most ground-breaking artists. He is best known as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he treated awestruck viewers to possibly the greatest fireworks show in history. His practice ranges over painting and drawing, video, installation and performance. The Ashmolean Museum exhibition CAI GUO-QIANG Gunpowder Art of 14 works ranges across Cai's career. They represent his profound engagement with both western history and Chinese artistic traditions and materials including paper, porcelain and silk. These include early experimental works from the 1980s in gunpowder on Japanese paper; works in coloured gunpowder on canvas; porcelain panels and sculpture with moulded decoration and gunpowder on the surface; and silk hangings with gunpowder. Coinciding with the Ashmolean's Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition, it also shows a selection of objects from the test for one of his most recent projects made in February 2019 in the amphitheatre of Pompeii where a wooden boat, life-size reproductions of Roman sculptures, terracotta pots and glass dishes were sprinkled with black and coloured gunpowders and ignited in a spectacular display that lasted more than three minutes.

Art History and Museum as Medium

Cai Guo-Qiang, Artist, gives the eighth and final presentation in the symposium.

In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii

Jerome Neutres, Independent Curator, gives the seventh talk in the symposium. Jerome Neutres is an independent curator, who earlier in 2019 curated the exhibition In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. He is the former director of La Reunion des Musees Nationaux Grand Palais and former president of the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris.

In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii

Jerome Neutres, Independent Curator, gives the seventh talk in the symposium.

Cai Guo-Qiang: In Search of El Greco

Saul Nelson, Ruskin School of Art, DPhil Candidate, gives the sixth presentation in the symposium. The talk will be considering Cai's work of that title in the exhibition in the light of affinities between his work and El Greco's, arguing that both artists pursue painting as a medium that captures the invisible. Saul Nelson is a third-year DPhil candidate at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. Saul works on post- war modernist art, with an emphasis on migration, and his work has been published in The Oxford Art Journal and The London Review of Books.