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Letter in Mail: Cai Guo-Qiang’s Peasant Da Vincis and the (Il)legibility of Transnational Art

Yi Gu 1

1University of Toronto

Accredited

ABSTRACT

By focusing on the 2010 exhibition “Peasant Da Vinci” by Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most acclaimed contemporary Chinese artists, this paper will examine the anxiety over legibility that was intensified by contemporary art’s engagement with identity politics. Instead of Cai’s trade mark pyrotechnic displays, “Peasant Da Vincis” featured works by ardent peasant inventors ― planes, robots, submarines, and helicopters, made of accessible materials in rural China such as water pump engines and wooden benches -arranged as installations. The exhibition demonstrated Cai’s determined distance from his earlier practices. While Cai’s firework pieces adorned the 2001 APEC in Shanghai and the 2008Olympics in Beijing, “Peasant Da Vincis” was intended to counter the 2010 World Expo held simultaneously in Shanghai, defining its subject as peasant in an effort to contrast the urban development theme of the Expo. Often criticized by Chinese scholars for his preoccupation with an international audience dominated by Euro-American curators and art institutions; in “Peasant Da Vincis”, Cai acknowledged his position as a diasporic artist occupying an in-between zone, eagerly embracing the task to convey messages to both sides. Accompanying Cai’s willingness to take specific positions was his promulgation of a universalist creativity that transcends the antagonistic divide between center and periphery,between current and passé, between elite and subaltern. This ideal of creativity was hardly inhabitable even in the utopian setting of Cai’s exhibition. In opposition to a largely negative critical reception, this paper acknowledges that “Peasant Da Vincis” challenged the popular idea of a smooth globalization of art that has persisted for nearly two decades. Approaching Cai’s “failure” as a reality check on the current conditions of transnational art, this paper will shed new light on familiar issues in the discussion of contemporary Asian art, thus unpacking the tensions between the local and the global, outlining the varied parameters of art’s social intervention, and calling for a theoretical rethinking of avant-garde art in Asia.

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