Cai Guo-Qiang. Ethereal flowers

The first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of the great Chinese artist (Leone d’Oro at the Biennale of Venice in 1999) is an exhibition played on lightness, evanescence, on the relation between real and virtual so to lead the visitor to a spiritual dimension. Among the projects made specifically for the City Gallery of Trento one will be dedicated to “Chung Kuo”, the documentary by Michelangelo Antonioni, made in 1972 with the consent of the Chinese government, and then immediately banished. According to the Chinese expectations the movie was supposed to picture modern China, the progress and the innovation, but the director was attracted instead by the crowds riding bicycles, the misery that nonetheless kept intact values of solidarity. As the target of a long denigrating campaign Antonioni became the symbol of Western wickedness, so much so that his name is written in school books and he became the most well-known foreign person in China after Marx and the fathers of Communism. Now the movie has been rehabilitated and Cai Guo-Qiang wants to go back to this example of cultural misunderstanding due, according to his words, “to the stylistic and formal discrepancy between Socialist Realism and Neorealism”.