Fengshui and stone lions
The exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum-"Cai Guo-Qiang: Hanging Out at the Museum" takes its Chinese name (literally "Cai Guo-Qiang soaks at the museum") from Cai's installation Cultural Melting Bath-a well-known work that he created after moving to the United States.
To the right of the museum's lobby, there's a courtyard regarded as having the best fengshui and airflow at the museum. Some dozen pines in containers have been placed there, as well as 18 rocks from Taihu Lake and a therapeutic bath steeped with Chinese goldenthread, ginseng and other Chinese medicinal herbs. Different groups of curious visitors put on swimming suits and come here to take a soak-becoming part of Cai's Cultural Melting Bath.
"New York itself is one big cultural melting pot," says Cai in describing his first impressions of the Big Apple. The installation has been exhibited in various places around the world, and Cai always asks Chinese herbalists for different prescriptions. The Taihu rocks are also repositioned depending on the fengshui of the exhibition space. And so that visitors can have the greatest physical, psychological and spiritual enjoyment, the bath is always placed at the most advantageous position according to the principles of fengshui.
Bearing testimony to his internal contradictions, Cai, despite being a firm believer in rationality and the dialectical materialism of Marxist-Leninist thought, also puts stock in fengshui and "the invisible world." Cai inherited his superstitious side from his paternal grandmother, who hired a female shaman to take care of him, cure his minor ailments and answer his questions. Later, when going abroad to pursue his studies and participate in exhibitions, he would always carry talismans with him.
For a solo show in the United States, he chose the theme of fenghsui: How is Your Feng Shui: Year 2000 Project for Manhattan. Moreover he brought 99 stone lions from his hometown of Quanzhou to the exhibition space in Manhattan.
His lions weren't just on display for exhibition; he also wanted to sell them to members of the public "whose homes had fengshui problems." He visited 400 homes of exhibition visitors who had applied for his advice. He would assess the homes' fengshui and place the lions in spots where it wasn't good.
As it turned out, rather humorously, most of these wealthy people had employed the services of professional architects and interior designers, and consequently the fengshui of their homes was fine. But they wanted to buy lions anyway. For instance, if a woman was worried that her husband was having an affair, she would buy a lion to put by his chair to keep him in line. It was win-win for her and Cai.
For Day and Night, Cai made a blueprint of silhouettes of a dancer taken over a 12-hour period, using it and gunpowder to convey the delicate lines of a female body as well as various different species of plants and flowers. It was a moving one-time experiment that merged the two-dimensional medium of drawing with performance art.