Cai Guo-Qiang’s Solo Exhibition Odyssey and Homecoming tours to the new Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai

(Shanghai, June 23) The Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), located beside the Oriental Pearl television tower in Shanghai, will open its doors to the public for the first time on July 8, 2021. Designed by the renowned Ateliers Jean Nouvel, MAP aspires to become a new landmark of Shanghai’s cultural landscape and a platform for international exchange of arts and culture. For its inaugural program, the museum will present three major exhibitions: Light: Works from Tate’s Collection; Joan Miro. Women, Birds, Stars; Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming.

Touring from the Palace Museum in Beijing where it opened last December, Odyssey and Homecoming features 119 of Cai’s signature gunpowder paintings and other works, including his widely acclaimed first- ever VR work Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City. The works in the exhibition represent Cai’s research, exploration, and voyage across the globe, recreating his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art

History project for audiences in China. The exhibition will take place across three floors of the new 40,000 m2 museum space. In three large galleries on the second floor, the exhibition unfolds across two sections. “Odyssey” features artworks from his solo exhibitions in world-renowned museums, in which he engages with the essence of Western art and civilization embodied within those institutions. He dialogued with classical Greek and Roman art in Pompeii and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Italian Renaissance at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Spanish Golden Age and Baroque Art at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Russian Socialist Realism at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Modernism at the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the early roots of Modern art in Cézanne’s hometown of Aix-en-Provence, in addition to ongoing trips to trace Medieval art history. The other half, “Homecoming,” debuts new works that encompass aspects of traditional Chinese art and culture as well as the cosmos as his eternal homeland. The fourth floor will showcase the artist’s early works in dialogue with his original passion for painting, as well as A Material Odyssey, a special exhibition curated by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

This exhibition marks another important step in Cai’s homecoming to Shanghai, following his 2014 solo exhibition at the Power Station of Art. Cai first saw foreign painters’ original works in person decades ago in Shanghai, which also sowed the seeds for his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History. Visitors will see how the fusion of and dialogue between the past and present, East and West, can all coexist in an individual. Showing this may have some special significance in a world that is shadowed by the pandemic and currently deglobalizing to a state of mutual isolation. The exhibition poses the questions: Can different cultures reach mutual respect? Can great cultures specific to certain people become shared heritage for all humankind?

This exhibition marks another important step in Cai’s homecoming to Shanghai, following his 2014 solo exhibition at the Power Station of Art. Cai first saw foreign painters’ original works in person decades ago in Shanghai, which also sowed the seeds for his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History. Visitors will see how the fusion of and dialogue between the past and present, East and West, can all coexist in an individual. Showing this may have some special significance in a world that is shadowed by the pandemic and currently deglobalizing to a state of mutual isolation. The exhibition poses the questions: Can different cultures reach mutual respect? Can great cultures specific to certain people become shared heritage for all humankind?

Cai Guo-Qiang writes in his Artist Statement, “Shanghai was the actual and tangible embodiment of Western culture for the young me…This exhibition addresses the wonder of my encounters with the West, the struggle over my unrequited love for my predecessor painters, and the deep breaths that I have taken in their hometowns and in the gardens of their art. Riding on the kite of my hometown, steering the spacecraft of human childhood across romantic horizons, just as the cosmic tree, castillos, the extraterrestrials, and ‘encounter with the unknown.’ The odyssey is also a search for a greater hometown.

I seek to encounter more artists from the past and present, from China and abroad, and through them, discover a shared ‘far-off land,’ a cosmic and eternal hometown.”

The exhibition also presents ten documentary videos directed by Shanshan Xia, featuring several major art museums worldwide, and the classic works and artists from various chapters of art history with whom Cai has dialogued. Among these videos is a new documentary short highlighting the Museum of Art Pudong project. An exhibition catalogue will be available at the opening (Sir Simon Schama as the editor- in-chief, produced by Imaginist and published by Beijing Daily Newspaper Publishing House). With nearly 380 pages and over 750 illustrations, the catalogue presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s Individual’s Journey through Western Art History. It also features A Guide to Cai Guo-Qiang’s Dialogues:99 Projects and Keywords, the first-ever guide that attempts to synthesize Cai’s expansive artistic output and the fundamental concepts and methodological pursuits behind it.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming

8 July 2021 – 7 March 2022

Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai

No. 2777 Binjiang Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China

Opening Hours:

Friday, Saturday and public holidays 10:00-21:00 (last admission at 20:00) Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 10:00-18:00 (last admission at 17:00) Closed every Tuesday (except public holidays)