Rockbund Art Museum Launches Digital Platform RAM+, Unveiling Cai Guo-Qiang’s First NFT Transient Eternity

On Wednesday, June 30, 2021, Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, launch its brand-new digital platform RAM+. Ten years since their first collaboration, RAM is honoured to invite the internationally acclaimed artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who curated RAM’s inaugural exhibition in 2010, to mark this new milestone of its development. On the occasion of RAM’s 10th anniversary, Cai has created his first Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project, Transient Eternity—101 Ignitions of Gunpowder Paintings. The artworks will be on view from July 14–August 14, 2021, at TR Lab (trlab.com), a platform partnering with RAM to discover NFT art from the world’s leading artists. 

Over the past ten years, Rockbund Art Museum has promoted contemporary art practices focusing on Asia, committed to going beyond the fixed definition of an exhibition, and expanding the dialogue with artists by gathering critical thinkers and practitioners from other social media cultural fields. RAM+ is an extension from the museum’s physical space into the digital world — bringing unique expertise in art and a commitment to sustainable values by supporting selected artists to engage with the possibilities of digital art and activating a curatorial approach to emerging digital ecology. Accelerated within the pandemic context, the association of digital art with NFT art offers new parameters in the digital art field. Beyond the art market and cryptocurrency community, how can an institution support the artistic creation of digital and NFT artists? RAM+ will initiate projects such as symposiums, commissions, virtual exhibitions and performative events, online publications, research and collective learning programs to embrace this new landscape and foresee the transformative changes in contemporary art.

While Cai Guo-Qiang is most renowned for his explosion events using the sky as a canvas. Including the Footprints of History fireworks for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony (2008), the conceptual fireworks One Night Stand over the Seine River in Paris (2013), and Sky Ladder (2015) realized in a small fishing village in his hometown. However, the artist extensive usage of gunpowder as an artistic medium began when he started exploring it on such supports as a canvas in 1984, thus establishing his unique gunpowder paintings.

Over the decades, Cai has exhibited at major museums across the world and in different cultures. He has created and presented a large number of gunpowder paintings. Each painting endures a meticulous preparation process, but the denotation happens in a blink. Yet, it is uniquely precious as the artwork’s moment of birth and mind-blowing in its intrinsic artistic charm. Regrettably, the impact of these moments has gone underappreciated, as focus often remains on the results of the detonation—paintings, sketches, computer renderings, photographs and video documentation—overshadowing the value, let alone the possession, of the moment itself.

Specially commissioned by Rockbund Art Museum on this unique occasion, Cai Guo-Qiang’s Transient Eternity transforms the “ignition moments,” a crucial part of the gunpowder paintings, to NFT. One hundred ignition moments form a single NFT, while the 101st will be minted as an additional NFT— a small surprise for the NFT community. These moments all come from the pieces Cai created during his recent Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History. This Journey includes exhibitions at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, the Prado Museum in Spain, the Uffizi Galleries in Italy, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and the Pompeii ruins in Italy, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the U.S. Each project engaged with the chapters of Western art history embodied within those institutions and, more importantly, reflected on the dilemmas and possibilities of contemporary art.

Cai comments, “Transient Eternity is the existence of the explosion moment itself — neither the videos nor photographs with which the ignition instant will preserve in the traditional sense or the physical gunpowder painting that was born from the ignition…Time and space at the instant of explosion become chaotic. Like the ‘Primeval Fireball’ that channels the birth of a new star in the universe, it is accompanied by piety, anxiety, and a sense of destiny anticipating the unknown. Each work’s detonation moment is unique, encapsulating the environment and climate of that time and place. It contains shared divination of fate and the brief dislocation experienced by myself and the audience. The project contemplates: Is it possible to create an art project with a more forward-looking vision, and with more compelling forms and concepts, by leveraging the core values unique to NFT technology?”

Larys Frogier, the director of Rockbund Art Museum, states, “In 2010, Cai Guo-Qiang transformed ‘low-tech’ inventions, handmade by peasants, into the art project Peasant Da Vincis. Before travelling to various institutions worldwide, it debuted at Rockbund Art Museum, including CCBB in Rio de Janeiro. It became the most visited exhibition by a living artist in the world in 2013. Over a decade later, the artist integrates the ‘high-tech’ nature of NFT with the moments of the birth of his gunpowder paintings to create another art project. The project poses the questions: What defines an artist’s work? What is an art project? It reflects on the questions surrounding the transience and eternity of the digital age symbolized by NFT and the core concept of how value is stored. In the isolation age of pandemic and post-pandemic, the project aims to reflect on the weight of transient existence in the eternal river of time.”

Beginning July 14, Transient Eternity will be featured in a 48-hour charity auction on the TR Lab platform. Half of the auction proceeds will go to the Rockbund Art Museum to support the museum’s development and digital art research programs. The other half will go toward Cai Foundation, mainly supporting the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) Cai Fellowship Program, which funds young Chinese artists studying in the United States.

 

Viewing the Artworks Online

The artworks will be on view from July 14–August 14, 2021, at TR Lab (trlab.com), a platform partnering with RAM to discover NFT art from the world’s leading artists.

Beginning July 14, Transient Eternity will be featured in a 48-hour charity auction on the TR Lab platform. Half of the auction proceeds will go to the Rockbund Art Museum to support the museum’s development and digital art research programs. The other half will go toward Cai Foundation, mainly supporting the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) Cai Fellowship Program, which funds young Chinese artists studying in the United States.

Transient Eternity—101 Ignitions of Gunpowder Paintings
Jul 14, 2021 – Aug 14, 2021

For more information, please visit www.rockbundartmuseum.org and https://trlab.com/.