Cai Guo-Qiang – ripe nights and dry days

Artist’s Web site

When Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune Stage 1 opened at Mass MOCA in 2004, the nine Ford Tauruses were low to or on the ground in a corridor in semi-dark.

In Seattle three years later, Cai said through an interpreter that he was thinking about suicide bombers, about how terrorism takes place in the middle of an ordinary day, and how we go on afterward.

Installed at the Seattle Art Museum, however, Cai’s intentions were undone by daylight. Placement too. Inopportune One hangs high over the lobby in bright light. What read as an explosion at Mass MOCA became a swizzle-stick oddity at the Seattle Art Museum. The easily alarmed might worry about one of those cars falling on them in an earthquake, but who thinks of suicide bombers? The tale does not relate. (Photo, Paul Brown, Seattle PI)

At the Guggenheim (smaller cars), the piece is different again, somewhere between a giant male charm bracelet, a vertical Nascar run and an illuminated Chinese scroll painting come to three-dimensional life.

In the dark, Inopportune carries the dark; in the light, it becomes artifice – like Oz, its tricks exposed.

And that’s where Cai lives, in the shifting ground of the metaphors he evokes. As the first falls away, other, more ambiguous ones take its place. Instead of determining the impact of this piece, context reveal another kind of impact latent in the work all along. Shutter the windows and turn out the lights in SAM’s lobby, and something close to Cai’s first thought will spring back into view.