CHARITY AUCTION ANNOUNCEMENT:

Gracious Karma

In 2005, while visiting Taipei, Cai Guo-Qiang invited me to join the creative team for the Beijing Olympics. As I already had a very full schedule of rehearsals, I was forced to refuse his kind invitation. However, just as he was leaving, I had a sudden inspiration; I asked him if he would like to collaborate with the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre on a joint work.

It is my earnest hope that the money raised by the auctioning of this painting will help to make up for the current shortfall in construction funds. I will do my best to live up to this demonstration of confidence by Cai Guo-Qiang and the many other people who have given us donations, by working to build the new "Cloud Gate House" into a place of spiritual nourishment that society as a whole will treasure, so that the kind of "gracious karma" that has helped to fund our new home can continue to exist down through the generations.

Sunflowers have become iconic symbols in most cultures around the world. Famed for the flamboyance of their yellow petals, they most often symbolize joy, warmth, happiness, and wellbeing. They can also represent good luck, wealth, opportunity and ambition, and in Chinese culture especially they have come to symbolize nourishment and longevity. Growing tall and strong, turning their heads to follow the sun's path throughout the day, they also stand for flexibility, and opportunity. Cai Guo-Qiang has aptly captured and instilled all of these qualities of the sunflower in the present work.

We say "aptly", because Cai has created this work from his heart to help celebrate a new beginning, a new life, a new dawn for some of his closest artistic friends and collaborators in Taiwan. In early 2008, a fire destroyed the studio of the world-renowned Taipei based Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, consuming not only their home but all their costumes, props and production archives. The internationally acclaimed dance troupe was left homeless, and the entire Taiwanese nation was shaken by the tragedy. Fortunately, Cloud Gate has many friends, and offers of help and donations flooded in. And no one is a greater friend to Cloud Gate than Cai Guo-Qiang who promised to donate one of his works of art to put in auction to raise funds for the completion of Cloud Gate's new home.

Cai created "Study for Sunflower" to fulfill his promise to his old friends in Cloud Gate, and the work takes on special significance when the circumstances of its creation are understood. The sunflowers bursting forth in the work truly represent a new jubilation and new joy for the dancers of Cloud Gate. With their long sinuous stems, sunflowers are themselves like dancers, moving their heads in time with the sun. Cai has magnificently captured the warmth, power and flamboyance of the sunflowers, along with the power and opportunity they represent.

Cai Guo-Qiang has a long association with Taiwan, where he has been embraced almost as a local hometown boy. Hailing from Quanzhou in Fujian province of Mainland China, Cai has a close affiliation with traditional Taiwanese culture which itself hails from Fujian province. Heavily folkloric, and imbued with the chaotic energy of Taoism, Taiwan has found an artistic hero in Cai, whose works and symbols speak to the heart and soul of every Taiwanese. This deep cultural bond brought Cai and Lin Hwai-min, the artistic director of Cloud Gate Theatre, to collaborate together.

Cloud Gate takes its inspiration from Chinese folklore, mythology, and legends, just as many of Cai's works also take their inspiration from the same sources. Cloud Gate's performances are imbued with the energy and flow of Tai chi, meditation, and martial arts, as is the energy of Cai's creativity and creations. Cai first collaborated with Lin Hwai-min on Cloud Gate's lauded show "Wind Shadow" which was performed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in other major cities overseas. Both Cai's and Lin's folk sense of otherworldliness and their untamed and untethered creativity have made them natural partners over many years.

Cai has embraced gunpowder as the principal medium of his creativity, both in his paintings and his firework displays. It is ironic that the method of creation of "Study of Sunflowers", fire, is exactly the same medium that destroyed Cloud Gate's original home. But it is this essential principal of fire or gunpowder that has captivated Cai so much, it is both destructive and creative at the same time. It is in a fire that the phoenix dies, so that it can be reborn anew from the same fire. This fundamental dualism is highly appealing to a mind raised in the Taoism and folklore of Fujian province. The yin and the yang, the seen and unseen, the known and the unknown, death and birth, are basic dualities and truths waiting to be explored by the creative and thinking mind.

In his early years Cai struggled to find a suitable medium to express his inner voice. At first, he experimented with different painting techniques that could harness natural forces. He used an electric fan on paint to create typhoon effects, fire to blister it, and used a dove to walk on wet paint. None of these methods satisfied his need to unleash his inner creativity. However, his local town of Quanzhou was the center of an industry that was to provide Cai with the perfect medium. Quanzhou uesd to be the center of the fireworks and firecrackers industry in China. Gunpowder was everywhere around him. He immediately saw the spontaneity that it offered him, the powerful release of energy, and the unknown result of using it. It was the ideal medium to give reign to his unbridled creative energy.

Cai grew up in a "dual" family. His grandmother and mother who raised him were both immersed in the local folk culture and especially in Taoism the dominant religious or spiritual movement in Fujian. Cai was surrounded by superstition, mythology and cosmology. Every time he went to a temple he was surrounded by magnificent carvings of phoenixes, dragons and other mythological figures. In contrast to this otherworldliness of energy and spirit, he also lived in his father's Confucius world. This world of moderation and personal responsibility was a major constraint on the young Cai, who found it stifling.

To be truly free, Cai needed to escape from his society. Rejecting the idea of going to a traditional art school, he enrolled in the Shanghai Drama Institute. As part of the new avant-garde movement his early works dealt with profound subjects and often contained political comments and concerns that have remained central to his art. His first opportunity to encounter a new world was in 1986 when he went to Japan. Coming from a tightly controlled society, he embraced its intellectual openness and discussion of the Western world. However, Japanese society is tightly woven and Cai was an outsider, an alien in his new land. He started to explored the properties of outdoor, large-scale gunpower events and started using it extensively in his art. Through its tremendous energy, destruction would ensue, from which something new and wonderful would be created. He first began his explosion projects here culminating in his series Projects for Extraterrestrials. These were explosion events on a grand scale, which were an attempt to engage viewers with the larger universe around them.

On moving to New York in 1995 he continued to document his explosion events in gunpowder drawings. At first the drawings were abstract, conceptual pieces aimed at encapsulating the unbounded energy of his explosions. He continued to experiment with explosives and as his understanding of his material grew, he brought greater refinement to his drawings. He then started creating individual works of enormous power and beauty. As his knowledge and understanding of gunpowder has grown over the years, he has acquired an almost supernatural ability to coax it to create startling and provocative works.

"Study for Sunflower" from 2010 has been created at the height of Cai's abilities and creativity. The flowers are imbued with power and glory, as their petals shine forth, and they exude a joyous and contagious energy, holding their heads high in adoration. The work is a fitting testament to the resilience, spirit and hope for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. And as a magnificently beautiful and powerful work created from fire, suggests that Cloud Gate's future will also be one of new life after the fire.