Cai Guo-Qiang for Kids
GOMA hosted Cai Guo-Qiang’s first solo exhibition in Australia. His artworks have included explosion events, gunpowder drawings and large-scale installations. To coincide with the main Gallery show, the Children’s Art Centre created an interactive space for young visitors to create their own artworks, by emulating the artist’s style.
The activities included a make your own paper sculpture with templates for a boat, animal or tree, and multimedia activities where children could make their own gunpowder drawing or fireworks display. Play the games online.
The artist had strong opinions about how his artworks could be transformed into children’s activities, which presented many challenges at the concept stage. I developed the paper templates to give the children foundation shapes that encouraged their creativity. Trials of the activity helped me to understand the limitations of different age groups, which directed the construction of each template.
Responsibilities
- Concept development
- Design and development of paper templates
- Sourcing and testing activity materials
- Liaising with printers
- Design iteration as the result of user testing templates
- User interface design
- Illustrating additional assets
- Collaborating with the web team and animators
- Liaising with the exhibitions team and designing additional elements for install
- Exhibition signage development and production
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, opening weekend.
In the space, children can play the multimedia games on one side of the table and make paper sculptures on the other side. Along the left-hand wall are large screens they can view their explosion events and display areas underneath for their gunpowder drawings and paper sculptures.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, installation view.
When a visitor is playing the games on the iPads, they can see their explosion events on the large display screens across the room, beneath these screens are the paper sculpture display boxes.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, opening weekend.
Visitors constructing their own paper sculptures.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, opening weekend.
Child playing the fireworks interactive game in the Children’s Art Centre.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, opening weekend.
Child playing the gunpowder interactive game in the Children’s Art Centre.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre GOMA, opening weekend.
Child displaying his creation as part of the paper sculpture activity.
‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, Let’s Create an Exhibition With a Boy Named Cai’, Children’s Art Centre Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane installation view.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s map of the artworks he has created around the world.
Interface designs for the gunpowder and fireworks interactive games.
Photography courtesy QAGOMA.
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