Cai Guo-Qiang Timelapse

Inopportune: Stage One (2004), Biennale of Sydney installation

About Cai Guo-Qiang
Born 1957 in Quanzhou City, China
Lives and works in New York, USA

Cai Guo-Qiang has a history of making works of extraordinary beauty from violent beginnings; most famously using gunpowder, fireworks and explosions. Of his sculptural installations, Cai’s Inopportune: Stage One (2004) is one of the most challenging and spectacular. The installation of nine cars appears arrested in an animated sequence of explosion; each identical white vehicle frozen in an arc of detonation, blast, launch, tumbling, gravitational return, and rest. The cars are pierced with pulsing rods of light that simultaneously suspend the cars like wings and penetrate them like blades, signifying a coexisting violence and beauty. This work, along with a related video installation Illusion (2004), showing a car that appears to blow up while ghosting through New York’s TimesSquare, dominates the  vast Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island.

This film was commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney. Photography and production by Grant Stewart, assisted by the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Supported by the Nelson Meers Foundation