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Cai Guo-Qiang is an artist the late Hunter S. Thompson would have loved.
Think of the rental cars Thompson's narrator wrecked in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," and it's easy to imagine this art work (nine full-size cars lifting off into an airborne arc and streaming with colored lights) warming the drug-crazed heart of gonzo journalism's main man.
Right at home in a hallucination, Cai's "Inopportune: Stage One" will make a real-life appearance when the Seattle Art Museum reopens its expanded downtown site next spring.
"Inopportune" will be situated in the museum's free-admission space known as the forum, a corridor running along First Avenue from Union to University streets, with wide windows allowing visitors to compare the liftoff inside to the traffic jams outside.
SAM also acquired from Cai a 90-second video titled "Illusion," depicting a car exploding in New York City's Times Square.
SAM trustee Robert Arnold purchased Cai's work for the museum. Former modern art curator Lisa Corrin saw "Inopportune: Stage One" when it was exhibited at Massachusetts Mass MoCA in 2004, and prevailed upon SAM director Mimi Gates to see it there.
Corrin initially considered commissioning Cai to create a piece for the Olympic Sculpture Park, opening on the waterfront this fall. Instead, she campaigned for the museum to acquire the already existing "Inopportune," which had dazzled her at Mass MoCA. The museum, as always, declined to say how much it paid for the piece.
In a prepared statement, Gates called "Inopportune" a "major work by a globally recognized, innovative master. It will shatter your expectations of a museum and embody the new SAM."
Cai was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. Son of a historian and painter, he trained from 1981 to 1985 at the Shanghai Drama Institute in stage design. Living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he used gunpowder as medium, which led him to experiment with explosives on a massive scale in "Projects for Extraterrestrials." Concerned about China's repressive approach to artistic freedom, he lives in New York City.
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