Image Credit... Jessica Dimmock for The New York Times

After Sept. 11, 2001, Cai’s large-scale work took on a darker tone. (On the day of the terrorist attacks, he was working in Italy, but his wife and daughter remained in downtown New York. He and Wu now have two daughters, 18 and 4.) One of the most striking pieces in his current retrospective is “Inopportune: Stage One,” from 2004. As recreated for the Guggenheim, “Inopportune: Stage One” consists of nine white American cars suspended vertically in the rotunda. Flashing light tubes protrude from the cars like arrows. Even without appreciating the grisly contemporary allusion to car bombs, you can respond to the savage beauty of “Inopportune: Stage One.” Indeed, Cai maintains that the specific references underlying his art are secondary to the feeling evoked. He argues that an artist in Beijing would typically depict political themes explicitly, but the southern Chinese favor an oblique approach. As an example, he cites a great ink-brush painter who lived in Nanchang in southeastern China in the 17th century. “Bada Shanren always chose to paint weird rocks and orchids,” he explained. “Because this artist is a prince of the Ming dynasty, which was overthrown by the Qing dynasty, he wanted to express his frustration and depression. The tragedy of the conquered Ming dynasty and the loss of his family will pass away in time. What will stay is the spirit of sadness and frustration in his work.” In 2006 Cai did a rooftop installation, “Transparent Monument,” at the Metropolitan Museum; in it, he erected a large sheet of glass, through which the skyline was clearly visible, and placed replicas of dead birds at its base. “Some people are aware that it implies the planes going into the World Trade Center, but a lot of people don’t know that,” he told me. “For me it is not important. What is important is that the event inspired me to do this. I use that kind of sense to make the echoing of the tragedy longer but less dramatic.”

The most elaborate installation in the Guggenheim exhibition is “Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” the piece that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and secured Cai’s international prominence. “I was thinking, Why couldn’t traditional sculpture be presented in the modern arena?” Cai recalls. “I thought I would present it as performance art and allow people to experience the creation of the sculpture. And I was thinking, Why couldn’t the last Venice Biennale of the 20th century contain socialist work? Those sculptures are like haunting spirits.” The original “Rent Collection Courtyard” was a tableau of more than a hundred life-size clay figures, created by the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in 1965 to depict the oppression of peasants by a cruel landlord in pre-Communist China. Copies were exhibited throughout China during the Cultural Revolution. As a schoolboy, Cai saw it in a Confucianist temple in Quanzhou. “I still remember how the sculptures were placed and following the story, and tearing up and crying,” he told me. “I thought, The Communist Party is remarkable, because it can make people cry looking at a static sculpture!” For his Venice installation, he brought over some Chinese artists, including one who worked on the Sichuan original. Visitors to the exhibition could walk among the sculptors and watch them create the finished figures. Left unfired, the clay over time crumbled. After the conclusion of his New York retrospective, “Rent Collection Courtyard” will travel with the show to the Guggenheim Bilbao. But in the exhibition’s intermediate venue, at the National Museum in Beijing during the summer Olympics, this installation will not appear. “It still has its own power and can’t be consumed,” Cai said, with apparent pride. “There are a lot of paintings that make fun of Mao, like putting flowers on his head or making a female version. Those works can be exhibited in China. But the Rent Collection Courtyard’ is still forbidden in China. That implies there is a power in it, people don’t want to touch the tragedy or the historical scar. You will offend a lot of people. That is the charm of it, and that is why I wanted to do it. Although the work can’t be shown in China, people in China pay a great deal of attention to it. Probably when one day the work can be shown in Beijing, I won’t want to do that.”

Nothing better expresses the duality of Cai’s nature than his attitude toward his country. While he delights in the discomfort that “Rent Collection Courtyard” causes the Chinese authorities, he is dedicating two years to planning Olympic ceremonies that, whatever their specific content, will glorify the state. “Some parts of Cai Guo-Qiang I don’t really understand very well,” Fei Dawei, the Paris-based curator who in 1990 gave Cai his first exposure in the West, told me when I met him in Beijing in December. “This part is very patriotic, and it shows in the Olympics work. I feel that deep in his heart, Cai is very proud to be Chinese. So I think he is very sincere about this work.” The “Chineseness” in his art is a subject on which Cai is characteristically ambivalent. “Western people will use their own culture, and they won’t worry about being too Western,” he told me. “So of course we don’t need to worry about being too Eastern.” Yet when he was working with the Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-min on the dance “Wind Shadow,” they agreed that the piece should seem modern. “He said, ‘Yes, no Chineseness,’ ” Lin recalled. “Then at the dress rehearsal I said, ‘I think we failed.’ He said: ‘Why? It looked good.’ I said, ‘The whole aesthetic behind the stage is of ink and water.’ Although we tried not to look like Chineseness, the touch was Chinese. It’s a different sense of time, a different sense of space. Behind all of that is calligraphy and landscape painting.”