The Taipei Fine Arts Museum presents a retrospective exhibition for the artist called “indispensable to this world” by The New York Times. Cai Guo-Qiang has left his mark on various cities and countries, from Fujian to Shanghai, from China to Japan, and from New York to the world. His work expresses a kind of metaphysical thinking derived from Eastern philosophy and modern cosmology. Known worldwide for his gunpowder-based works and large-scale installations, Cai became the first Chinese artist to hold a solo exhibition, I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2008.

This retrospective, which traveled to Beijing and Bilbao, demonstrated his achievements and place in contemporary art. Hanging Out in the Museum is the largest retrospective to be organized since. In addition to showing the same large-scale installations, gunpowder drawings, and video documentation of his explosion projects, Cai has specially created three significant new works for this exhibition in Taiwan: Strait, Day and Night and Taroko Gorge. Embodying his unique historical and cosmic view, these works address the problems of existence faced by man in contemporary society through artistic forms and clearly illustrate the process of realizing Cai’s artistic ideas.

Named among ArtReview’s annual Power 100 four times, Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province. He speaks Fukienese and is also a follower of the goddess Mazu; for him, coming to Taiwan “feels like coming home.” In 1998, Cai was first invited by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to realize Golden Missile and Advertising Castle for the 1998 Taipei Biennial. In the same year, he was commissioned to realize the No Destruction, No Construction: Bombing the Taiwan Museum of Art project. In 2004, Cai curated the BMOCA (Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art: Everything is Museum No. 3). After the September 21, 2000 earthquake and August 8, 2009 floods, he donated his works to charity sales, showing his deep affection and friendship for Taiwan.

This is Cai’s second collaboration with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and his first exhibition inside the tall, spacious galleries of the museum. Through the positioning of the installation works in the architectural space, Cai looks back at his works and places them in new contexts, challenging and energizing the museum space in unusual ways. The 35 works on exhibition are drawn from internationally renowned museum and private collections, and include three specially created new works. The first floor features a total of seven large-scale installations, while the second floor features gunpowder drawings, video documentation, and timelines.

As a contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang not only dreams audaciously, he is also strongly effective at realizing his artistic vision. His explosive energy does not stem from gunpowder, but from an unrestrained flow of creative energy, an ability to create social dialogue, and a dogmatic romanticism. This exhibition highlights the artist’s background and development, his creative process, and his insistence on and methods of making art more accessible to the general public. To fully embrace the theme of “hanging out at the museum” and to create opportunities where the public can interact with art, a series of activities and programs, such as the public viewing and volunteer training for the creation of several gunpowder drawings in the exhibition, and related education programs have been initiated. The exhibition also seeks to examine Cai Guo-Qiang’s creations and the zeitgeist in his art, through contemplating the practice of contemporary art, critiquing socio- and geopolitics, and reflecting on Eastern aesthetics and philosophy.

The brilliant graphic sensibility of Harry Callahan (1912-1999), a major figure in American photography, is the focus of "Harry Callahan: American Photographer" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Debuting November 21, the exhibition features approximately 40 photographs that survey the major visual themes of the artist’s career. It celebrates the Museum’s important recent acquisitions––by both purchase and gift––of Callahan’s photographs and showcases significant examples of his artistry from the collections of friends of the MFA. The many sensitive pictures that Callahan made of his wife Eleanor, his depictions of passers-by on the street, his carefully composed landscapes and close-ups from nature, and experimental darkroom abstractions reveal a wide-ranging talent that was enormously influential.

"Harry Callahan was one of the most innovative photographers working in America in the mid 20th-century," said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA.

"His elegantly spare, introspective photographs demonstrate his lyricism and the originality of his sense of design."

The Detroit-born photographer, whose career spanned six decades, became interested in the camera in the late 1930s while working as a Chrysler Corporation shipping clerk. He was largely self-taught, and attracted admiration early on for his originality. By 1946, Callahan was hired as a photography instructor by the Hungarian-born artist László Moholy-Nagy for the Institute of Design, a Bauhaus-inspired school of art and design in Chicago. In 1961, Callahan was invited to head the photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he was based until retiring to Atlanta two decades later.

"Harry Callahan’s approach helped shape American photography in the second half of the 20th-century," said Anne Havinga, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, who organized the exhibition.

"His way of seeing inspired countless followers and continues to feel fresh today."

Callahan concentrated on a handful of personal subjects in his work, exploring each theme repeatedly throughout his career. These include portraits of his wife Eleanor, depictions of anonymous pedestrians, expressive details of the urban and natural landscape, and experimental darkroom abstractions. The MFA exhibition is organized into five themes: Eleanor, Pedestrians, Architecture, Landscapes, and Darkroom Abstractions.

In 1936, around the time that Callahan began to explore photography, he married Eleanor Knapp, who served as one of his first and most frequent subjects. Callahan’s portraits of his wife, characterized by their intimate yet detached poetry, have become a landmark in the history of photography. In the photograph "Eleanor" (about 1948), Callahan portrays his wife in a private interior setting, facing away from the camera. After the birth of their daughter Barbara in 1950, she too entered these family pictures, which capture the intimate moments of daily life as seen in the photograph, "Eleanor and Barbara" (1953).

Callahan photographed the natural landscape throughout his career, focusing on its evocative forms and textures. In images such as "Aix-en-Provence", France (1957), he explored the visual effects that he could create either through high contrast or closely related tonalities. Callahan also utilized a range of different experimental darkroom techniques—from photographing the beam of a flashlight in a darkened room, to developing one print from multiple negatives. Many of his multi-exposure pictures were made by superimposing images from popular culture onto studies of urban life. Callahan’s openness to experimentation was stimulating for the many students who worked with him.

Callahan made many of his best known images during his 15 years in Chicago, where he also began his role as an influential teacher. During the 1950s, the photographer embarked on a series of close-ups of anonymous pedestrians in the streets of Chicago, most of them women. Using a 35mm camera with a pre-focused telephoto lens, he captured passersby unaware of his presence, resulting in snapshot-like images that record unsuspecting subjects absorbed in private thought or action, such as Chicago (1950), a close-up of a preoccupied woman’s face. Callahan returned to this theme frequently, working in both black and white and color.

Callahan was repeatedly drawn to architectural and urban subjects. Prior to moving to Chicago, he explored the spaces of Detroit, photographing the formal patterns he discovered there. In "Detroit" (1943), Callahan depicts a street scene, with the people in transit appearing as a pattern. He experimented with color in these pictures as early as the 1940s, but he worked more extensively in color later in his career, from the 1970s onward.