Cai Guo-Qiang's Retrospective at the Guggenheim

Cai Guo-Qiang's recent retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum is naturally generating lots of press.

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In response, I post a bit from my Master's thesis Borrowing the Enemy's Arrows: Strategies of Contemporary Chinese Conceptual Artists where I discuss one of Cai's works:
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Globally aware, many Mainland Chinese contemporary artists capitalize on the Oriental stereotype that is projected onto them and reflect it back to the Western art world....

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Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (1998) perfectly illustrates this intelligent strategy. For the Inside Out: New Chinese Art exhibition at P.S. 1 in New York City in 1998, he installed a life-sized boat made of rice straw from his hometown, Quanzhou, an ancient seaport. Suspended from the air, the boat was pierced with a multitude of arrows and a People’s Republic of China flag, attached to the stern, waved frantically in the breeze produced by an electric fan.

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The work is based on a third century Chinese tale. A famous general, in knowing that he did not have enough arrows to win an imminent battle, sent out three hundred boats of straw filled with straw figures. To the enemy, the boats and figures seen through the mist seemed real enough and they attacked, shooting hundreds of arrows that pierced through the straw boats. The general recovered the arrows that were embedded in the boats to defeat his foe (Gao, Inside Out 34).

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Here, Cai uses a traditional Chinese narrative to create multiple layers of meaning: historical, cultural, theoretical and autobiographical. The boat symbolizes the female and the piercing arrows the male gaze. Also, in exoticism, the “other” is seen as female while the “self” is male. This piece is effective because it is normally exhibited in a Western exhibition space where figuratively, Cai, like the general, strategically takes the art world’s arrows to his great advantage. The boat of arrows then becomes a metaphor for Cai’s art practice, as he reflects and deflects the image of Asian artist that is projected upon him by the Western art world.