Cai Guo‑Qiang. Head On
The art installation by Cai Guo-Qiang “Head On” consists of 99 life‑sized wolf replicas arranged to appear as a pack charging into an (almost) invisible glass wall.
The wolves toward the front “crash” into the glass and fall, while those behind continue to surge forward as though unaware. Cai Guo‑Qiang has said the work is meant to evoke the idea that “visible walls can be overcome, but invisible ones are harder.”
The wolves represent how groups sometimes follow momentum blindly, possibly into disaster. Because it was for a Berlin show, the work also engages with German history, division, walls, and the psychological legacies of division. The swirling formation, collapse, and upward energy also suggest cyclic repetition, struggle, conflict, and the fragility of progress.
The work was first exhibited at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2006, as part of a solo exhibition.
Cai Guo‑Qiang (蔡国强) (1957) is a globally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist best known for his gunpowder art, explosion events, and large-scale installations that explore the tension between destruction and creation, history and myth, and individual and collective memory.
Exhibited at major museums: Guggenheim (NY), MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and more. Director of Visual Effects for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening and Closing
on view at Naoshima New Museum of Art, Japan
ft/ Kate Zaniewska
