Cai Guo-Qiang - Reflection–A Gift from Iwaki, 2004
Installation view at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, 2010.. Photo by Ono Kazuo, courtesy Cai Studio

Cai Guo-Qiang lived in Japan from 1986 to 1995, and by turning the art-making process into a medium unto itself, he developed a fate that would be forever intertwined with those of the residents of Iwaki, a harbor city in Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan. In 1994, Cai collaborated with a group of volunteers in Iwaki to excavate an abandoned wooden boat from the local beach, reconstructing it and then exhibiting it at the Iwaki City Art Museum. In 2004, the 10th-anniversary project Reflection—A Gift from Iwaki commemorated their collaboration: the Iwaki volunteers excavated another wooden boat, which was then sent as a gift to Washington, D.C., where it was exhibited at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

This artwork is also composed of white porcelain coming from the county of Dehua in the province of Quanzhou in China. The work later traveled to the National Gallery of Canada, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The same group of volunteers from Iwaki has accompanied this boat to each site in order to install the work for exhibition.

For this upcoming exhibition at MAMAC, the Iwaki volunteers will take this well-travelled boat originating from Japan to the Mediterranean, once again collaborating with the artist to install the boat in the coastal city of Nice.

Cai Guo-Qiang, 2010
Installation view at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, 2010
Photo by Ono Kazuo, courtesy Cai Studio