Cai Guo-Qiang’s fiery works on revolution come to Moscow

The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang came to Moscow this month bearing gunpowder and a deep love for Russian culture. October, his first solo exhibition in the city, at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (until 12 November) is a musing on revolution as Russia marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising and he recalls the impact of China’s Cultural Revolution on his youth.Autumn,a 16-meter installation of birch trees grown especially for the show and baby strollers and cribs donated by Muscovites has taken over the museum’s façade. Three 20-meter-long gunpowder works created in dramatic sessions at VDNH, a Stalin-era fairgrounds, decorate the grand staircase and main exhibition halls. One of them,The Soundoffers words of warning fromThe Internationalescorched with gunpowder onto silk: “There are no supreme saviors: neither God, nor tsar, nor hero!” Cai pays homage to Konstantin Maksimov, a Soviet painter who taught in China in the 1950s and is still revered there. In an essay for the exhibition Cai writes about discovering Russian art and says that Russian culture seemed “so expansive that, to us, it was the definition of foreign culture; it was the West to the East.”