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The Museum of Modern Art
Course: The Museum of Modern Art > Unit 1
Lesson 6: Artist interviews- Andrés Jaque: COSMO | Young Architects Program 2015
- Gilbert & George: The Early Years
- Cai Guo-Qiang | Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows
- Richard Serra | Equal
- "Weaving the Courtyard" by Escobedo Soliz | Young Architects Program 2016
- Artists Experiment 2014 | MoMA
- THIS IS ISA GENZKEN | MoMA
- Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves | MoMA
- James Rosenquist, "F-111," 1964-65
- Lee Quinones on graffiti
- Studio Tour: Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
- Richard Serra, "Intersection II"
- Richard Serra, "Torqued Ellipse IV"
- Richard Serra, "Band," 2006
- Wolfgang Laib, "Pollen from Hazelnut"
- Gabriel Byrne revisiting "The Quiet Man"
- Carolee Schneemann, "Up to and Including Her Limits"
- Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself
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Cai Guo-Qiang | Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows
Artist Cai Guo-Qiang recounts the third-century tale that inspired his work "Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows." See this work in person through April 2016, as part of the exhibition "Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection." Learn more: http://bit.ly/1LXBVPe.
Want to join the conversation?
Was this the same Zhuge Liang as from the Three Kingdoms Era?
And, was this story about the enemy's arrows ever able to be confirmed, or might it perhaps be legend?(2 votes)
Video transcript
We dug the boat out of the mire at the seashore in my hometown. It was actually covered in sludge. So we waited till the tide had taken
some of the sludge away to dig the boat out. Then we cleaned and disassembled it, and eventually brought it to New York. I wanted to expose the skeleton the frame of the boat, which looked more like an artwork. The story of borrowing the enemy's arrows is about borrowing the opponent's strength to make oneself strong in a short time. There was a very resourceful
general called Zhuge Liang. He filled the boats with straw soldiers and sailed toward the enemy's camp. Mistaking the boats with straw soldiers for a surprise attack the enemy showered the decoys with volleys of arrows. The boat is a very familiar object to me. It is one of the earliest vehicles that helped humans understand their relationship with gravity. However, when the body of the boat is full of arrows like feathers it suddenly transforms into a bird and seems able to fly.