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Inopportune: Stage One Inopportune: Stage One

Cai Guo-Qiang2004

Biennale of Sydney

Biennale of Sydney
Sydney, Australia

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 Times Square, dominated the vast Turbine Shop on Cockatoo Island, for the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010).

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 Times Square, dominated the vast Turbine Shop on Cockatoo Island, for the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010).

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  • Title: Inopportune: Stage One Inopportune: Stage One
  • Creator: Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang
  • Creator Lifespan: 1957, 1957
  • Creator Nationality: Chinese, American, Chinese, American
  • Creator Gender: Male, Male
  • Creator Birth Place: Quanzhou City, Quanzhou City
  • Date: 2004, 2004
  • Provenance: Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006.1 (Exhibition Copy) Shiseido, Gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006.1 (Exhibition Copy) Shiseido
  • Type: Installation, Installation
  • Rights: http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/legal-privacy/, http://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/legal-privacy/
  • External Link: Biennale of Sydney, Biennale of Sydney
  • Medium: nine cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes, nine cars and sequenced multi-channel light tubes
  • Edition: 2010: 17th Biennale of Sydney: THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE – Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 2010: 17th Biennale of Sydney: THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE – Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age
Biennale of Sydney

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