As the calendar crept ever closer to Jan. 1, 2000, preparations for the turn of the new millennium ramped up.
Some focused on planning the celebration of the century, while others were concerned solely with survival. The Y2K talk was all about software bugs and global apocalypse and emergency bunkers. There was an air of uncertainty, a collective holding of breath as the clock tick tick ticked closer to midnight. And then... nothing happened. Cue raucous celebrations.
However, there was one work of art originally designed to welcome the new millennium that would have added a little more substance and reflection to the revelry.
In 1993, artist Cai Guo-Qiang proposed an interactive piece entitled Placid Earth for inclusion in a planned United Nations exhibition. For this work, he envisioned coordinating a global blackout for the two seconds that bridged the old century and the new.
“Let [Earth] return to the universe, dark and quiet like the other planets; let her leap across Time and Space, a thousand years, ten thousand years, all the way to where it meets the original, primal self,” Cai wrote in his proposal.
But it wasn’t to be. The ambitious project was never realized and Earth entered the new millennium with lights blazing.
Cai was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City into an intellectual family deeply affected by the Cultural Revolution, when he was only 9. His father was a calligraphy artist and a bookseller who, according to Cai in the 2016 documentary Sky Ladder, spent most of his income on books, much to the chagrin of his mother. Cai’s father told him that his inheritance would be the library he was accumulating, but when China’s political revolution began, the family was forced to burn them all.
While Cai incorporates pieces of his Chinese heritage and traditions into much of his work, his career has largely taken place outside of the country. In 1986, he moved to Japan; nine years later he relocated to New York City where he continues to live and work today.
Throughout this time, Cai was rising to prominence in the global art world. While he has worked in many different mediums, he is most famous for his work with gunpowder—massive fireworks displays and large paintings made from detonated gunpowder.
A variety of forces drew Cai to gunpowder as a medium of expression. As art historian Wu Hung writes in Contemporary Chinese Art, “On the one hand, Cai takes pride in the fact that gunpowder was invented in China, and that the ancient Chinese did not create it to abet violence—it was their search for elixirs of immortality that led to its discovery. On the other hand, he was also fascinated by the destructive force of dynamite, which was featured prominently in revolutionary movies, dramas, and comic books during the Cultural Revolution.”
His experiments with this explosive medium started at a young age. In a 2018 piece on CNN, Cai recounted an early trial when “I ignited the fire [and] the entire canvas lit up.” He was saved by his grandmother who calmly “put a rug in the living room over the fire. From a young age I've learned a lot from her.”
In honor of this early support, Cai dedicated his work Sky Ladder to his grandmother. In this piece that took over two decades to realize, Cai built a 1,650-foot ladder made of explosives and kept aloft by a large balloon, and then lit the fuse and watched as the fiery stairs climbed up into the night sky.
The piece was first slated to take place in Bath, England, in 1994, then in Hong Kong, then Los Angeles, but each new iteration encountered difficulties—weather, terrorist threats, wildfire—and had to be cancelled. Cai finally pulled it off in 2015 in a small fishing village, with his grandmother tuning in to the spectacle via FaceTime.
In the Sky Ladder documentary, Cai talks about how he was trying “to connect the Earth to the Universe,” with this work. His vision for Placid Earth may not have included quite the same bang as this artistic fireworks display, but it would have also served as a bridge into the unknown.
From an early age, Cai was fascinated by outer space and the idea of alien life. In the documentary, he talks about watching the 1969 space launch that would put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, and feeling sad knowing that he would never get to go to space. “But later on, I realized that art could be my space-time tunnel connecting me to the universe,” he says.
The idea behind Placid Earth is simple, though seemingly impossible to pull off. “Observed from space, the Earth at night is ablaze with lights. During the last second of this century and the first second of the next century—the two seconds when the millennia meet—all inhabitants of the Earth should turn off their lights, letting the Earth ‘eclipse into obscurity,’” Cai wrote in his 1993 proposal.
A universal “midnight” would have to be designated so people across timezones would flip the switch at the same moment, but the effect, if pulled off, would send both a message out into the universe and one back to our own planet.
Like the stars we see at night, the Earth’s two seconds of darkness would “leap across Time and Space.” But it would also be a chance for self-reflection. Cai cites one of the motivations for the project as our over-reliance on electricity and the “enormous resources” wasted on lighting. In these two dark seconds, Earth would get a chance to rest.
Via a proposed live satellite broadcast that could beam the image of the darkened planet back into our homes, Earth’s inhabitants could see the effect of their grand gesture and “people would thus be able to gain a vivid perception and understanding of the relationship between the Earth's appearance and human society. Confirming how hypothetical one's place is in relationship to time would also serve to prove that on Earth there is no center.”
But nothing came of Cai’s proposal. In 1998, Cai wrote an essay for Contemporary Chinese Art, Primary Documents reflecting on his works that had not panned out. He cited Placid Earth when he wrote, “Some projects are temporal… If I miss the right time, I will become less enthusiastic.”
But just the year before, when the project had already stalled, Cai added an addendum to his proposal. “At the time when one hears of so many countries and groups planning lavish extravaganzas to celebrate the meeting of two millennia, this project for a ‘quiet celebration’ of mine seems to make sense again.”
The new millennium may have come and gone, but as we enter the start of a new decade, the message of Placid Earth—one of concern for our planet and reflection on our shared place on it—seems more relevant than ever.
