Cai Guo-Qiang: illuminating the new China; a regular on the international biennial circuit, the New York-based Chinese artist recently dazzled Shanghai with installations, paintings, gunpowder "drawings" and a signature fire-work performance—thus sparking intense debate over contemporary cultural identity

Cai Guo-Qiang's recent solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum was a homecoming of sorts. The artist, who left his native China in 1986 and has since become a familiar, widely lauded figure on the international circuit, has been back to China several times since his departure. However, this event marked a special honor--the first one-person show by a contemporary experimental artist to be mounted in a government-run art museum in China. It was accompanied by full fanfare: an opening replete with Chinese dignitaries and a daylong conference featuring an impressive array of national and international scholars. These tributes followed Cai's star treatment at the Shanghai Biennial 2000 and his showing last year at the city's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, which was attended by George W. Bush, Chinese chairman Jiang Zemin and various Asian Pacific presidents and prime ministers. On that occasion, Cai was invited to devise a firework spectacular on the Huangpu River for the closing of the forum, a performance duly documented in this exhibition.

The official feting of Cai is a sign of how much things have changed since the days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when Socialist Realism was the only fully authorized style and even traditional ink painting was deemed politically suspect. It indicates, too, a major alteration since the post-Cultural Revolution thaw that enabled artists like Chen Zhen, Huang Yong Ping, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing and Cai himself to leave China to pursue their artistic careers abroad. Indeed, governmental tolerance seems to have increased even since the early `90s, a time that found artists like Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan risking police interference and occasional arrest for performances undertaken out of the public eye in remote villages and abandoned sites.

At the age of 45, Cai, now a resident of New York, returned to China with a major international reputation. He was the winner of a Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 Hugo Boss Prize and a participant in numerous other international roundups. This spring saw the publication of Cai Guo-Qiang, the latest multi-author monograph in Phaidon's contemporary-artist series and the first to be commissioned about a native of China.

Cai began to emerge on the international scene during his years in Japan (1986-95), first making his reputation as "the Chinese gunpowder artist" with a series of works titled "Projects for Extraterrestrials." These events in both urban and rural settings involved controlled explosions, which, the artist claimed, were addressed to potential audiences beyond the earth. Eventually the "Projects for Extraterrestrials" carried Cai to Berlin, Stockholm, New York City, Johannesburg, Oxford and mainland China, where the productions have often taken on a political coloration.

However, unwilling to be pigeonholed, Cai has turned to a wide variety of other formats as well, adopting elements of Chinese history and ritual in installation works that touch on everything from feng shui to herbal medicine, Socialist Realism and Chinese funerary customs. These components often underscore points of convergence or areas of cultural misunderstanding with the West. His Hugo Boss project commented on the Asian economic successes of the 1990s with the creation of a Toyota-engine-driven dragon fashioned from inflated sheepskins. For the 1995 Venice Biennale, he transported an old-style Chinese fishing boat from his native Quanzhou to the Grand Canal, where it became the bearer of Chinese herbal medicines--thereby, as the title noted, Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot. For an exhibition at New York's Queens Museum in 1997, he created Cultural Melting Bath, a hot tub infused with herbal medicine and surrounded by river stones imported from China.

Despite this international recognition, the conference on Cai's work at the Shanghai Art Museum revealed that, within China, questions persist about the validity of his work. The main difficulty expressed by some of the panelists and a number of audience members revolves around the issue of exoticism. Is Cai playing the China card? Is he merely a token who has succeeded by acquiescing to Western notions of Chineseness? Does his recourse to traditional symbolism mask a basic emptiness in his work?

This internal Chinese debate sheds light on the complex balancing act that non-Western artists must perform to find a place within the contemporary art world. In the conference, Cai's defenders included New York-based curator and art historian Gao Minglu, who noted that the artist began using traditional symbols and materials in his work long before his departure from China. Austin Museum of Art director Dana Friis-Hansen pointed out that Cai's work draws equally on Western developments--among them Land art, Process art and Conceptualism. Further, David Elliott, director of Tokyo's Mori Art Center, argued that the attempt to separate form from content would reduce any art work to incoherence.