Cai Guo-Qiang: Life Beneath the Shadow
Until September 25; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Until September 11; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

If Cai Guo-Qiang had come to old Edinburgh a few centuries ago, and tried to summon up the spirits of the town’s most notorious devil-worshippers, he would have been drowned in the Nor’ Loch, or burned at the stake, or both. But the witch-hunts of the 21st century are of a different nature, and no-one gives the capital’s regular stream of ghost-hunting visitors a second glance.

Cai Guo-Qiang demands a second glance. The New-York based artist, born and bred in a part of China famous for the manufacture of fireworks, announced his arrival in Edinburgh just over a week ago with over 1200 custom-made gunpowder shells. These were rattled out from the Castle like anti-aircraft fire, forming a short-lived black “rainbow” in the Edinburgh drizzle.

Clusters of damp onlookers gathered below Castle Rock, where the Nor’ Loch used to be. It looked for a moment as if the castle’s occupants were firing at some invisible enemy, and then, within minutes, the black clouds had vanished into the Scotch mist. If artists can, as Cai believes, create tunnels in time and space, then perhaps the black smoke insinuated itself into Edinburgh’s reekie past.

This isn’t the first time Cai has used fireworks on a monumental scale. His theatrical training is quite apparent in the fiery dragons, inverted mushroom clouds and other explosive gestures he has made across the world. He also famously extended the Great Wall of China for a few seconds in 1993, by setting light to a 10 kilometre line of explosives.

Gunpowder has so many connotations for Cai; it’s deeply enmeshed in Chinese tradition, particularly in his home town of Quanzhou. Called “fire-medicine” in China, the substance was discovered during early medical research. Cai reclaims this healing power for gunpowder, setting it against its usual military purpose of death and destruction.

Fundamental to Cai’s work is the transfer of energy, or qi. Qi is a living energy of which all matter is constituted. We are just temporary manifestations of the stuff, which will dissipate on our deaths. There can be no more potent demonstration of this exchange of energies than in Cai’s gunpowder portraits.

The Fruitmarket Gallery boasts 11 of these ethereal images. They portray various figures from Edinburgh’s murky past such as Little Annie, who haunts the abandoned Mary King’s Close, and Major Weir, who was burned for communing with the devil, and, incestuously, with his sister.

It would be a mistake to view these images simply as drawings, made in the conventional way, by carefully dragging the medium around the paper. Instead, once the gunpowder is arranged on the paper, its fuse is lit, creating a single, impressive explosion. In that one instant, an image is burned into the paper, as if the qi of a tortured soul has rematerialised in the blast, adopting physical form for the first time in centuries.

It is a form of healing for these fabled individuals, whose histories are so deeply entwined with the paranormal. For those who were burned at the stake, their painful demise is symbolically reversed when they return to physical existence through a fiery blaze.

Dangling on a spider’s web above the gunpowder portraits are clusters of paper cut-out figures punctured with pins. Their shadows fall onto the walls like lost souls trapped between two worlds, which is exactly what these joss figures represent in Chinese belief. When the joss dolls burn, like the tortured souls in the portraits, they find release.

The subjects for Cai’s portraits were suggested by Scottish writer, James Robertson, whose accompanying ghost stories will appear in the forthcoming exhibition book. It’s a shame that the stories are not included in the Fruitmarket show, and an even greater pity that the characters’ biographies have been left out.

Downstairs, the artist has planted a grove of plantain palms, trees which are believed, in Cai’s native region of Fujian, to attract female spirits. Snippets of ghost stories are painted on the leaves, and as you browse, leaf by leaf, you find yourself drawn deeper into the moonlit forest.

The previous night’s CCTV footage plays next door. The black and white video, quite lyrical in itself, cuts silently from camera to camera, tree to tree. Watching it I think of the wide-eyed visitors who, with a heavy dose of wishful thinking, find ghostly phenomena in their photographs and videos of Edinburgh’s underground streets. Like them, I’m desperately hoping to see something inexplicable: a dancing light, a creeping shadow.

I’m usually easily spooked, but it doesn’t happen here. The clean environment of a white cube gallery is no place for a ghostly grove, and not a single shady fruit seller suggests herself to me. I’m left confused: this can’t really be about ghost-hunting, but as for Cai’s real intention, I’m left in the dark.

The Portrait Gallery, which hosts the smaller part of the show, does it more successfully. Storytelling is the stock-in-trade of this gallery, whose arched windows and high ceilings are far more conducive to a bit of ghost-summoning. Squeezed into a small niche, the morbid display benefits from its claustrophobic setting.

Two gunpowder portraits are accompanied by full biographical information and portraits from the gallery’s own collection. In between, a black, five tiered tower holds a sinister array of plaster death-masks. Each was cast from the face of a murderer shortly after his execution, some by hanging, others by the guillotine. Their names and crimes are documented, and through this most immediate kind of portraiture, you can step back in time to look them in the eye. A CCTV camera here would be far more frightening.

Ultimately, Cai’s intention is not to conjure up ghosts and capture them on video. It is to explore our relationship with the unseen world, past and present. But his work encompasses so many questions and answers that it’s hard to find them in the clutter. Edinburgh’s bloody past is more than one exhibition can handle, and its spectre haunts the two galleries so successfully that any subtler questions fade into the background.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.08.05