Now we know what we’ll see when we walk into the new Seattle Art Museum, which opens in spring 2007: nine identical Ford Tauruses suspended from the ceiling and outfitted with pulsating LED lights, tumbling wildly down the windowed forum along First Avenue and landing in an upright position in the lobby of the old SAM.

This is Inopportune: Stage One, a major acquisition for SAM by the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

A press statement from the museum says that Inopportune: Stage One borrows the horizontal format of hand-scroll paintings and the frames of film. (It also looks like an echo of the biblical radiant lamb of God, but I’m not sure that’s an appropriate overlay. Inopportune: Stage Two, which won’t be at SAM, is tigers jumping in the air, pierced by arrows that appear to lift them up, referring to a 13th-century Chinese story of a bandit hero who saved a village from a man-eating tiger.)

SAM has also acquired the accompanying video, Illusion, to be installed in a second-floor gallery that will be free to the public. The video depicts a car exploding in Times Square. “The burned-out car used to make the video will be on display near the projection to lend a sense of reality,” the press statement says.

This is not the first time Cai has exhibited a major work in a Seattle museum. His large boat pierced by arrows and flying the Chinese flag, titled Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows and commissioned for the excellent traveling show Inside Out: New Chinese Art, took over a corner of the Henry for a time in 1999 and 2000.

Cai, who was born in 1957, has lived in New York since 1995. He is known for work balancing the beauty and destruction of explosions, including drawings made by exploding gunpowder on the surface of heavy paper. Shortly after Sept. 11, he set off fireworks over the East River between Manhattan and Queens in a piece called Transient Rainbow, which referenced but transformed the violence of the terrorist attacks.

Inopportune: Stage One and Illusion were part of a solo exhibition for Cai titled Inopportune, commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. About Inopportune: Stage One, the artist said in an interview for the public-television art show Art:21:

Ever since September 11th, the idea of terrorism is always on our minds. It’s ever so present. And while car explosions have been around for a long time, they have a heightened sense of reality in our minds. “Inopportune” obviously has a direct reference to these conditions that we live in now. But making an installation that is so beautiful and mesmerizing that also borrows the image of the car bomb already has inappropriateness in it. Of course, there’s a concept behind it, but never mind the concept—just the very fact is a difficult thing to overcome. It’s difficult to resolve for some people. Whatever it is, it’s a quite direct reference and commentary about some of these issues. So maybe in this way it’s kind of unfashionable or inappropriate, or inopportune.

Since the ’80s, maybe the ’90s, irony is such an important part of work now. There’s less direct commentary or direct reference to certain social problems or phenomena in our world. Nowadays artists tend to stay away from these kinds of ideas and take a more humorous approach, poking fun at society. All of my work is quite direct, for instance the car bombs or the tigers. It’s a quite a direct reference and commentary about some of these issues.