Globalizing the Disaster Cai Guo-Quang’s The Century with Mushroom Clouds

The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Quang’s arrival in the US in 1995 commenced a series of performances entitled The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century (1995-), in which he staged small-scale explosions in front of iconic American sites. While these interventions were necessarily time-specific, my paper will focus on one of the permanent objects produced as part of this project: a large-scale work on paper (1996) with the same title.

I shall trace the link that Cai’s choice of mediums establishes between global economy and ecology: from gunpowder, a Chinese invention, to the Japanese paper, and Japanese ink used to sign the piece. Despite being associated with East Asia, these materials were sources in America:for instance, the gunpowder was removed out of firecrackers sold in New York City’s Chinatown.

The apparent ease of circulation of people and goods across the globalized world, which allowed for the creation of the piece, reveals a more foreboding sense of interconnectedness within our world. By bringing the images of atomic clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki back to the country responsible for these disasters, Cai suggests the impossibility of displacing the trauma of nuclear violence against people and the environment: what happens outside the empire, will inevitably come back to it. At the same time, via harnessing the power of explosion towards artistic goals, and monetizing it, Cai puts a question mark over the creative potential of destruction, and its ethics.