Be Careful with Fire
During interviews, lectures, and Q&A's, Cai is often asked if he has encountered any misfortunes in his long career working with gunpowder and explosives.
The answer, of course, is yes.
For the exhibition catalogue Sky Ladder, he recounts:
For the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia, I proposed an explosion project titled Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Gloried or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 28. My idea was to ignite a fuse in midair over the Brisbane River, where the flame would travel downstream like lightning, snaking along the surface of the water, then crawl up the riverbank, cross the highway, climb up and entangle the bridge, and finally disappear underneath the bridge. While sliding on the surface of the water, the lightning bolt of flame would wind and curve like a dragon, paying homage to the Aboriginal Australian myth of the Rainbow Serpent.
The day before the ignition, we were working in the lot outside the pyrotechnic company’s garage, inserting the fuse into plastic casing, while pyrotechnicians were inside the building dismantling the unexploded firework shells from the night before. I was sitting in the shade of a truck, checking the connections at the fuse joints. Suddenly, an intense bang erupted from the garage. Before we could make out what was going on, everyone bolted from the garage as fast as they could. Then we all ran, and the force from the continuing explosion pushed us forward.
We escaped to the nearest highway. When we finally looked back, the entire factory was ablaze. Fireworks of all colors were shooting in every direction; it was quite a spectacle. We could clearly hear the fuse for the Rainbow Serpent project, which measured tens of thousands of meters, exploding continuously. I suddenly realized the wife of the company’s owner was sobbing uncontrollably. I thought her husband must still be inside the garage. Then another pressing issue hit me: “Where do you store all the gunpowder?” I asked her. After I asked her several times, she suddenly dashed back into the blazing lot. A few minutes later, she reappeared, driving the twenty-meter tractor-trailer in whose shade I had been working earlier. The tires and lights were on fire, and the bumper and door handles were giving off black smoke.
Just then, miraculously, her husband walked out from the sea of flames. He was torched from head to toe; a large piece of his skin had peeled and was dangling off his arm. Only his belt and the pockets of his pants remained unscathed. The rest was smoking. I rushed over, trying to put out the flares on top of his head, but as soon as my hand touched his hair, it shed like ashes. He yelled, “Water, give me water!” Then he turned on a faucet to splash water on himself. I held on to him and wouldn’t let him touch the water, as I heard that this could make a burn victim prone to infection and lead to sepsis. His wife helped hold him down, too.
Press helicopters were flying over the scene, and soon ambulances and fire engines arrived. The emergency medical care staff quickly wrapped the owner’s body with large bags of ice. The firefighters opened up the door of the truck; the paint on the truck’s license plates was charred completely, but inside, the three tons of gunpowder were intact. If this amount had gone off inside the enclosed truck, it would have blown a giant pit in the ground, and everything within a radius of hundreds of meter, including us, would have all been torn into pieces.
Later, I retrieved the Queensland Art Gallery curator’s burned suit jacket and the remains of videographer Araki Takahisa’s camera and displayed them as the installation Be Careful with Fire, part of Origins and Myths of Fire: New Art from Japan, China, and Korea, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan. Originally, I wanted the work to embody the notion “to cure illness with poison; to fight evil with evil,” and burn a fire engine at the opening. But the Brisbane incident made it impossible for me to do so. I had developed a greater fear and respect for the god of fire. Although the accident wasn’t the result of my work, it signified on some level that using gunpowder as a medium was the “unstable” factor in my practice. It also embodied the be-careful-what-you-wish-for aspect of fate that I had felt over the years.
