EXHIBITED:

Trading Place: Contemporary Art Museum /Contemporary, Generation, Aesthetics, Technique, Institution, Taipei MoCA, Taipei, April 2-May 22, 2005

ILLUSTRATED:

Kao Chien-hui, Nan Fang Shuo, Britta Erickson, Trading Place, Taipei MoCA, Taipei, 2005, color illustrated, pp. 138-145

Trading Place: Contemporary Art Museum,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, 2005

Cai Guo-Qiang's solo exhibition "I Want to Believe" opened in the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao in March 2009, and it has attracted the attention of many international media. This exhibition debuted in the Guggenheim Museum New York City in 2008 and set the record for the highest number of visitors for the museum. Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Chinese artist to have a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum. Yang Shin-yi, the exhibition designer, has said that an artist's solo exhibition in the Guggenheim is almost equal to the recognition of a "lifetime achievement award."

Cai Guo-Qiang, an internationally renowned artist, lives in America and has won countless awards. He was on the shortlist of the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize, an art award granted through the collaboration of the German garment brand and the Guggenheim Museum New York; he won the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999, the supreme honor in the field of art; he won the CalArts/Alpert Award of the California College of the Arts in 2001; his artworks were crowned in 2005 by the International Association of Art Critics with two laurels: Best Monographic Museum Show New England, and Best Installation or Single Work of Art in a Museum New England; he received an award as a contributing international contemporary artist, the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007. Cai Guo-Qiang has been listed several times in ArtReview's Power 100.

Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Mainland China avant-garde artist who has built footprints in Taiwan. He is from Quanzhou, Fujian Province, and thus his origins have a lot in common with the people of Taiwan. Most Taiwanese are immigrants from Fujian Province, and most of them are from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Cai, therefore, has the advantage of close folk ties with Taiwanese in terms of geographic origins, common dialects and accents. He held his first Taiwan solo exhibition in Taipei's Eslite Gallery in 1998, and two of his artworks "Golden Missile" and "Advertising Castle" were displayed in the 1998 Taipei Biennial. He also "Bombed" the Taiwan Museum of Art with fireworks, which drew major attention and became a hot topic. His "Extend the Great Wall for Ten Kilometers" was displayed in the National Museum of History in 2000; after the occurrence of September 21 earthquake in Taiwan, he created in Taiwan "The Mark of 921 - Gratitude", which was then sold for charity and after being exhibited in the Taiwan Museum of Art; he attended the Kinmen Bunker Art Show in 2004; he sold exploded Golden Yuan Bills (paper money issued by the Kuomintang in 1948) through TV shopping, and a video installation which recorded the sales as performance art was displayed in MoCA Taipei [The video is part of this work]. Cai Guo-Qiang will visit Taiwan and hold a solo exhibition in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in November 2009.

Cai Guo-Qiang attracts more global attention than any other contemporary Chinese artist. He is very accomplished in creating the most avant-garde contemporary art using very traditional Chinese elements such as gunpowder, porcelain, Chinese herbal medicine, kites, bamboo rafts, and Fengshui. He grew up in a period which allowed him to develop a rebellious streak, and for all his life as an artist he has dared to act beyond other's limitations. His art concepts are so extraordinary that they seem almost like impossible missions. He was born to be a counter-reactionary, and he has never been afraid of courting governments to put forward his convention-overthrowing art creations. In particular, he chooses hard-to-control and dangerous gunpowder as the main media material for his art creations arousing the strongest reactions. Cai has said: "Gunpowder is actually one of the sources of my designs and ideas, rather than any intention. By means of the powder, I still come back to the meditation of the world and human beings." Cai's firework explosions have reflected many current topics, and many of them are also closely connected to our daily life. For example, at a moment of high-tension in Cross-Strait relations in 1998, Cai tried to dissolve the political deadlock with his "Golden Missiles" a work which was actually a metaphor for money attack. Other major events such as 911, an APEC conference in Shanghai, and the Beijing Olympics, have all witnessed his explosive art. Cai's creations have incontrovertibly recorded global events.

Cai Guo-Qiang in self-mockery said that he has a whimsical brain. He has quite extensive interests and his artworks have been related to many fields. His works have been created in cooperation with different professionals, such as ISSEYMIYAKE the fashion designer, film directors, architects, music composers, and dancers among others. Cai cooperated with Tsai Kang-yung, a Taiwan media person, to complete an event of "Air Shopping Network", which was part of an exhibition in the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum designed by Kao Chien-Hui in 2005. The designer's original concept was "Trading". Cai mulled the concept of position exchange in the field of art, and asked Tsai Kang-yung, a collector, to collaborate in planning and implementing his artistic idea. The original motivation for his plan was to discuss "How undisguised the tact of selling art could be", and "How many consumers who were never keen about contemporary art would be attracted". He was in effect challenging the masses' acceptance of works of art, and bringing forward the value and significance of works of art in the commercial market.
Taiwan has witnessed a boom in the development of TV media. Cable TV is installed in almost every single household, and there are a spectacularly large number of TV channels. The shopping channel's 24-hour selling programs of various items have flourished. For ordinary people, TV media is near, but art is far away with a relatively smaller audience group; for ordinary people, art only exists in galleries or museums. Perhaps many TV or Audio-Visual professionals seldom pay a visit to an art museum during their entire life. Cai's project was certainly a creative attempt to promote works of art through a TV shopping network, tapping into the regional media environment and characteristics of Taiwan. As regards contemporary art, it followed the dada-style in art where ordinary conventions were overthrown.

The Golden Yuan Bills after explosion
which were divided into 66 sets of numinous talismans

Golden Yuan Bills were issued by the Kuomintang government on August 19th, 1948 to control inflation at that time. However as inflation spiraled out of control the value of the Golden Yuan Bills crashed, the issuance of which was stopped in less than a year. The bills became the shortest lasting currency that existed for the world. With the present financial storms, Cai's artwork can be seen as a type of warning and a sarcastic comment on monetary value. Exploding old money avoided the suspicion of destroying and insulting the national money. On the contrary, the artwork was translated into "Safety Tally" of a traditional engraving style. The artist selected the elements of "money" and "talisman" as the selling point of their work of art, and this would make it easy to accept for the mass. The value-adding comments of shopping experts also promoted a successful media selling of the works of art.

66 (Double six represents great success and prosperity in Chinese culture) sets of antique Shanghai Golden Yuan Bills (each set includes two bills) were spread on four sheets of Japanese paper mounted screens. The Cai Guo-Qiang blew up the bills on the screens. The Bills burnt into various different patterns, and were then pasted onto A4-sized cotton paper, stamped, signed by the artists, and framed to become the "Tally of Safety and Fortune", which Tsai Kang-yung used as the rallying call as he exhorted sellers to buy the works. The entire performance started on March 29th, 2005 in MoCA, Taipei, but the venue for the event was moved to Jiancheng High School due to rainy weather. A forty-minute auction was held at the counter of MOMO at nine o'clock the following day. Tsai Kang-yung as guest host acted as a shopping expert, and Cai Guo-Qiang, sitting beside him as the seller of the artworks, accepted commodity consultations. The price of each set of "Tally of Safety and Fortune" was NT$ 99,000.00 (about USD 3,000). The 66 sets of works were, as expected, sold out within the scheduled time. As with other commodities, the works could be returned if any buyer felt dissatisfied with their purchase, to guard against such a case 35 alternate buys were taken and kept in reserve on the day. The whole TV auction process was recorded on video, and formed a part of the creation of "Art Shopping Network".

Gao Qian-Hui said in the foreword for the exhibition of Taipei Contemporary Art Museum: "Besides power, money is also an object of imagination related to power and value. The boundary between works of art and commodities has always been a direct topic of contemporary artists. It is also a miracle of contemporary culture that a creator of art can rapidly become a famous artist. Because of this miraculous atmosphere, the process of production and entering the market is filled with the mirage of 'art' and 'business opportunities'. This performance of marketing post-modernism art is between realism and surrealism, and is both reality and absurdity This was the reason for the personal demonstration of the auction, 'Tsai Kang-yung vs. Cai Guo-Qiang' in Trading Place. Cai Guo-Qiang recently produced 'Art Museum Is Everywhere' development series, in which he was inclined to cooperate with other artists for performances and would make his partner's techniques of representation classical collections. When the 'Contemporary, Generation, Aesthetics, Technique, Institution' (the word-by-word translation of Contemporary Art Museum from Chinese to English) invited him to give voice to the field of contemporary art, Cai Guo-Qiang invited Tsai Kang-yung, a collector and a well-known celebrity in the field of comprehensive art in Taiwan, to stand side by side with him. According to Tsai Kang-yung's proposal, Cai Guo-Qiang would explode a batch of Golden Yuan Bills, and Tsai Kang-yung would sell those exploded Golden Yuan Bills on the TV Shopping Channel. The proceeds would be handled according to conventional business rules. The whole performance was recorded on video, which was produced in the studio of a TV station and displayed at MoCA, Taipei for the duration of the exhibition. Simultaneously this would be mixed with multiple telephone voices of the mass purchasers who would like to place an order, thus forming a spatial installation. The purpose of producing such a program of 'Art Shopping Network' is to test how people, who would never think of visiting a museum, would react to the price of such objects and this way of selling art. This idea also intended to project art, which is usually regarded as something standing high above the masses, directly into the homes of each and every viewer by means of the most universal, popular, and fashionable form of TV shopping. The two partners pointed out that: In terms of the rising and falling of values, works of art are similar to Golden Yuan Bills, so art is a money exchange. They are all about market."
"Art Shopping Network" installation work is the record of the entire project. The grand spatial installation work including the four screen panels which were covered with 66 sets of Golden Yuan Bills and then exploded with gunpowder, and the video recording of the selling of exploded bills on the shopping channel debuted in the "Trading Place" exhibition in MoCA Taipei on Apr. 2nd, 2005. "Art Shopping Network" strengthened the image of social and art collection with the Taiwan media, and sold contemporary art through the media. The auction and selling conducted by the artists, collectors, the media, and the art museum interlinked the concept of collection in the art mechanism. The economic capital represented by Golden Yuan Bills and the cultural capital represented by works of art are thus linked in an interesting way.