Cai Guo-Qiang Gunpowder Art Symposium Oxford University

Conference Programme for the conference.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Artist, gives the eighth and final presentation in the symposium. Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) is, quite literally, one of the world’s most ground-breaking artists. He is best known as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics where he treated awestruck viewers to possibly the greatest fireworks show in history. His practice ranges over painting and drawing, video, installation and performance.
The Ashmolean Museum exhibition CAI GUO-QIANG Gunpowder Art of 14 works ranges across Cai's career. They represent his profound engagement with both western history and Chinese artistic traditions and materials including paper, porcelain and silk. These include early experimental works from the 1980s in gunpowder on Japanese paper; works in coloured gunpowder on canvas; porcelain panels and sculpture with moulded decoration and gunpowder on the surface; and silk hangings with gunpowder. Coinciding with the Ashmolean's Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition, it also shows a selection of objects from the test for one of his most recent projects made in February 2019 in the amphitheatre of Pompeii where a wooden boat, life-size reproductions of Roman sculptures, terracotta pots and glass dishes were sprinkled with black and coloured gunpowders and ignited in a spectacular display that lasted more than three minutes.

Jerome Neutres, Independent Curator, gives the seventh talk in the symposium. Jerome Neutres is an independent curator, who earlier in 2019 curated the exhibition In the Volcano: Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. He is the former director of La Reunion des Musees Nationaux Grand Palais and former president of the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris.

Saul Nelson, Ruskin School of Art, DPhil Candidate, gives the sixth presentation in the symposium. The talk will be considering Cai's work of that title in the exhibition in the light of affinities between his work and El Greco's, arguing that both artists pursue painting as a medium that captures the invisible.
Saul Nelson is a third-year DPhil candidate at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. Saul works on post- war modernist art, with an emphasis on migration, and his work has been published in The Oxford Art Journal and The London Review of Books.

Paul Bevan, Ashmolean Museum, Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting, gives the sixth presentation in the symposium. Arrows, fire, and gunpowder were all central to the art of war in pre-modern China and aspects concerning these will be briefly introduced in this talk as they relate to the art work, 'Myth: Shooting the Suns' by Cai Guo-Qiang.
Paul Bevan is the Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, and has taught modern Chinese literature and history at Oxford, Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies. His primary research interests concern the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912-1949). His publications include A Modern Miscellany - Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen (2018) and “Intoxicating Shanghai”- An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (forthcoming).

Lena Fritsch, Ashmolean Museum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, gives the fourth presentation in the symposium. Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, working on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions of international art. Recent exhibitions include A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (2019) and Ibrahim El Salahi: A Sudanese Artist in Oxford (2018). One of her main research areas is Japanese art and photography; recent monographs include Ravens and Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version byThames and Hudson, Japanese by Seigensha, both 2018). Before joining the Ashmolean she worked a Tate Modern, and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Fritsch holds a PhD in Art History from Bonn University, Germany, and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo.