Cai Guo Qiang, one of the well known Chinese artists outside China. He has done a lot of installation and performance art all over the world about some kind of abstract symbolism. I found this “Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows” very interesting. It is the famous “Battle of Red Cliff (Chi Bi)” during the Three Kingdoms (San-Guo) period in Chinese history, where a weaker army was able to defeat the stronger by a clever tactic of sending boats with grass-stuffed figures into the enemy’s territory and collected the arrows for use as weapons.Chinese artists (and architects) often find it very difficult to express themselves artistically in the modern world without comparing to the West and looking back to the long cultural history. How can we be not western but also not traditional?
Eliza (my wife) said to me the other day, “There is no Chinese or American contemporary art anymore, it’s all global now.” There may have some truth in it, given that Cai is actually living and working in NYC.
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