Bridging Art Across Cultures

Born in 1957, Cai Guo-Qiang was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. His work has developed to encompass different mediums including drawing, installation, video, and performance. He is well known for his gunpowder drawings and site-specific, large-scale explosion projects that investigate the interchange between the viewer and the larger realm. In 2018, to celebrate the opening of his solo exhibition Flora Commedia: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, Cai held a daytime explosion event on Piazzale Michelangelo, overlooking the city of Florence where 50,000 customized fireworks lit up the sky resembling thousands of flowers. “Sweet Briar” was part of the Flora Commedia exhibition and was exhibited in a gallery where the majority of paintings were flowers – a simple subject that allowed Cai to combine new and old, east and west methods in his application of European metal point drawing techniques with ignited gunpowder and incense sticks to sketch directly on the canvas.

In addition to Flora Commedia, Cai’s many solo exhibitions and projects at major museums including the Prado, Madrid, Spain; Tate Modern, London; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Born in Shanghai, Zheng Chongbin studied at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in China before traveling to the U.S. where he received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. Like many other contemporary Chinese artists, he is bi-cultural and spends his time between China and the U.S. Influenced by both western and eastern cultures, Zheng uses ink wash art as the artistic language in his works and keeps exploring the potential of ink as a medium. He studied figurative painting at first and later focused on conceptual art, abstract expressionism, and the post-modern deconstruction of light and space.

His work in the ink medium embodies a concept in which matter both imposes on its own form and also produces a metaphysical dimension. Zheng says, "my intention is to investigate the logic of the ink medium and its perceptual characteristics, the alternation between transcendence and the materiality of the work. The medium retains the core values of its history, while emphasizing contemporary procedures, especially in regard to material content, which it concerns about the perception of mental volumes in relation to physical space. It forms a shift toward objectification, toward an experience of architectonics and frontality."