If I Could Fly

We are just returning from a very interesting exhibition at the CCBB. What an interesting guy. When we lived in Beijing, my students had mentioned this guy who was building the strangest robots, robots that were more like themselves references to art movements: Cai Guo Qiang (蔡国强). His work was installed here in Brasilia. In fact there was several parts to this exhibition. The first one was presenting these funny (and at times spooky) rough-looking animated robots; painting, pulling a rickshaw, playing chess, barking, walking around, spitting water. Emmanuel did not really like this hooded one, which admittedly had the feel of some kind of horror movie when walking rigidly towards him. The staff was having a kick at following small kids around with its tele-guided puppet. Thankfully my son did not have nightmares.

A large room was dedicated to CGQ's "paintings" with gunpowder. As a child who witness the Cultural Revolution, CGQ grew up in a setting where both fireworks and cannon blasts were common. This work is certainly a way to channel those memories. The artist had initially laid large canvasses in the outdoor covered space in the garden, where some tiered stands were installed for the public to witness the performance. Under the canvasses, with specific care, he would lay down certain quantities of gunpowder in specific patterns, and eventually set it in fire that he and a number of his assistant would put out. The walls of this room where we watch a video of this where covered with the results of his experiment.

The last portion of the exhibition was CGQ's curated collection of flying and floating machines and devices made by various unknown peasants in rural China. All this handmade machines presented there at one point flew or floated, which is pretty amazing when you start thinking about it. I really like the story of this one machine who was saved by CGQ and some villagers, as the wife of the constructor was furiously destroying the machine to burn it, upset that her husband wasting all their small income on the construction of devices such as this one.