First look reviewSky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-QiangReviewKevin Macdonald’s documentary, which has premiered at Sundance, draws an emotional line from the Chinese artist’s traumatic childhood to the inexhaustible glee of his firework sculpture
“Everyone loves to light fireworks,” Cai Guo-Qiang says with a smile as he ignites some red candles. He’s in a factory in Liuyang, a Chinese city known as the fireworks capital of the world. Cai is here on important business, to scout for new ways to continue making abstract art in the most whizz-bang, flamboyant and audience-engaging way. Kevin Macdonald’s documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang follows the continuing ascent of this Chinese-born, New York-based artist as he works in different mediums for different patrons, often for different ends.
Cai was nine when the Cultural Revolution began, which put great strain on his calligrapher/bookseller father. As Cai later tells his daughters over glasses of white wine on their comfortable Manhattan couch, he was forced to burn all his father’s precious books. The memory still makes him emotional, and while art critics have been analyzing Cai’s use of explosives and gunpowder in his paintings for years, Macdonald draws us a direct line from that traumatic experience to his conflagratory projects of today.
While he works in a number of forms (taxidermy, large-scale sculptures involving automobiles) Cai first gained renown in the art world for canvases that swapped painting and drawing with post-immolation markings. It’s action painting of a type, but Macdonald grants us insight into the process and, as expected, it’s hardly as haphazard as sceptics might think. The process of tracing gunpowder, laying stones for pressure points and igniting the work is thrilling to watch, as is Cai’s blend of professionalism and inexhaustible glee.
If there is a lesson to take away from Sky Ladder, it’s that being an upbeat and agreeable person may have its advantages in the art world. (One can’t help but compare it with another recent documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, which followed the gifted but combative Ushio Shinohara, beaten down by financial and relationship woes, often of his own making.) Without connecting all the dots Macdonald’s film skips ahead to show Cai as an art world titan creating the fireworks displays he calls explosive events.
Here’s where Sky Ladder gets a tad juicy. Most of the explosive events are easily differentiated from a typical fireworks show. Transient Rainbow, an agreeable, mid-air bridge of colour bending across the New York skyline less than a year after 9/11 could be interpreted as some sort of healing act. And as Cai’s profile grew, he began to work, alongside filmmaker Zhang Yimou, on enormous projects for the Chinese government, namely the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony and the welcoming pyrotechnics of the APEC China 2014 Summit.
The APEC process doesn’t go too well. Bureaucrats meddle with Cai and Zhang’s vision. When critics ask, “what the heck was up at APEC?” even his most ardent supporters shrug. Cai dodges the question during an interview, and wonders why other artists aren’t called out when working with their own governments. Artists only get hassled when they were born in China.
As redemption, however, we turn to the windmill Cai has tilted at for over 20 years: his Sky Ladder project. A reaction to images of Saturn V rockets leaving for the moon, Cai conceived Sky Ladder as a way of connecting the Earth to the rest of the universe, but stumbled in three attempts to get it accomplished. In the 1990s, he was rained off in England. After 9/11, an Australian attempt was shut down due to security measures. In 2012, he was forced to cancel a try in California because of wildfires. Finally, and without a sponsor, Cai dug into his own pocket last year to create the work in Quanzhou, the small village of his birth.
Pictures and videos don’t do the piece justice, so Macdonald mitigates by staying close to Cai, his supportive family and his 100-year-old grandmother, watching from a hospital bed via Skype. (The emotion onscreen is enough to make up for the cheesy music choice.) Even the most art-averse cynic will recognise the blood, sweat and tears that went in to creating this strange and beautiful experience. After all, it’s fireworks, and everyone loves to light fireworks.
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