Fierce wolves in Cai Guo-Qiang's Head On

It may be the year of the Tiger, but in the Exhibition Gallery 2 of the National Museum of Singapore (NMS), wolves get the lion's share. This August, NMS is host to contemporary international artist Cai Guo-Qiang's solo exhibition Head On. The artwork seems simple enough - his materials are gauze, resin, painted hide, and a glass wall. Seeing the exhibit up close is an entirely different story. There are 99 life-sized wolves leaping one after another towards an invisible wall, each wolf seeming to rush forward with all its might. Those at the front crash into the wall and fall on each other, but the rest charge ahead fiercely, unmindful of the growing heap on the floor.

On a Sunday, the exhibit drew a number of people, although most seemed more interested in posing with the wolves for pictures rather than considering what the exhibit meant. Ironic, considering that the installation serves to remind people that invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle. Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG, Head On was Cai's first solo exhibition in Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2006. Before traveling to Singapore, the exhibit was mounted in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. The exhibit notes read: "Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree." The wolves are awesome, with or without understanding the exhibit notes. It took Cai half a year to make the wolves, working from January to June in 2006 in his hometown, Quanzhou, China. A local workshop specializing in producing realistic, life-sized replicas of animals was commissioned to make the lifelike wolves, which are actually clothed in painted sheepskins and stuffed with hay. Cai developed the artist editions of cast resin wolves based on movement studies made of small clay models. What sets apart the installation in Singapore from the previous exhibitions is the presentation of the wolves against a black background, making the piece look more dramatic. Accompanying the installation are two other works from Cai. Illusion II is a two-channel video installation that runs for eight minutes and 40 seconds. The looped video is of a German-style house in the area of Anhalter Bahnof, the old railway terminal in Berlin whose ruins after the Allied bombing campaigns of World War II are visible in the background. Cai packed the house with fireworks, and initiated the countdown to the magnificent explosion at 9:30 pm on July 11, 2006. The terrifyingly beautiful event of the house's destruction was captured on film camera and video as an accompanying work to an explosion project of the same name. The other work featured alongside Head On is Vortex, an explosion project of a drawing of innumerable wolves chasing one another in a circular motion. The drawing, was created in the Deutsche Bank Atrium by exploding various grades of gunpowder on paper, where images had been previously stenciled in. The traces left after the explosion form a pack of wolves moving with great energy in perfect unity, making the dynamic piece seem to burst from the wall. Next to the piece, a video of the explosion project is looped. - GMANews.TV Head On runs until August 31, 2010 at the Exhibition Gallery 2 at the basement of the National Museum of Singapore, 93 Stamford Road Singapore