One of my all time favourite art installations, it is an image I think about frequently. Installed in various museums in the world, Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese installation artist, whose paintings made with gunpowder you may have seen.
These nine tigers are life-sized. They are in the throws of death. They are pierced through so many times, they look like the ships Zhuge Liang uses to borrow 100,000 arrows from Cao Cao.
Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows, 1998, Cai Guo-Qiang
Inopportune: Stage Two, 2004, Cai Guo-Qiang
I genuinely couldn't tell you why, but I find the look of something pierced by this many arrows really compelling. It's excessive, it's cruel. It is a condemnation of the way tigers have been nearly extinct due to hunting and it hits for that. But also, when we place so many alike objects so close together our mind begins to form patterns and begins to see beauty in the horror.
There is so much incredible motion in these figures.
Don't look away.
Sometimes I wonder if it works with another animal: smaller or much larger. Are the proportions of the arrows in relation to the animal perfect for the effect? A size where their cumulative effect is much larger than the animal they pierce, but where that animal is large enough to accommodate a number large enough to make a pattern we find compelling.
