Metropolitan Museum of Art Adds Works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Qiu Xiaofei, and Matthew Wong to Collection

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has expanded its modern and contemporary holdings with acquisitions by three Asian artists. Cai Guo-Qiang's 1991 eight-panel paper work, Bigfoot's Footprints: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 6, features abstract ink and gunpowder marks and includes Chinese inscriptions outlining technical instructions for a gunpowder explosion project he executed during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics opening ceremony. Qiu Xiaofei's monumental 2019–21 painting, Belovezhskaya Forest, draws on his childhood in Harbin and weaves personal and political narratives into a surrealistic scene of a forest on the Poland-Belarus border, a site associated with Nazi occupation and Soviet history. Matthew Wong's 2019 painting, End of the Day, created in the year of his death, blends Chinese poetic sensibilities with Western abstract influences in rich hues of royal blue and blood orange, depicting a solitary figure in a moon-lit landscape. These works, now on view in Gallery 918, explore themes of time, geography, and sociopolitical realities through memory and imagination. The artists represent different generations and backgrounds, having developed careers across mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, and the United States.