The designer of the New Year’s fireworks display at Taipei 101, Cai Guoqiang (蔡國強), yesterday blamed the much-criticized under-par display on technical problems and denied ascribing the problems to slow administrative procedures at the Taipei City Government.
In a written statement, Cai clarified his previous comments made in an interview with the Chinese-language weekly business magazine Business Today and said the administrative procedures of Taipei City’s Fire Department did not delay the shipping of fireworks, which arrived in Taipei on time on Dec. 31.
The design team failed to execute the ending of the display — which should have been the firing of flash bombs that would illuminate the sky — because of problems with computer network connections, he said.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
“The fireworks display also fell short of the public’s expectations because our engineers in New York did not arrive in Taipei until Dec. 30 because of a snow storm in the US,” Cai said.
Cai, a New York-based Chinese artist who employs both of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) daughters, was responsible for the design of the explosive extravaganza at Taipei 101 and at Dajia Riverside Park on New Year’s Eve, beginning the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China’s founding.
The fireworks show at Taipei 101 cost a total of NT$60 million (US$2 million) — double last year’s budget, while the firework display at Dajia Riverside Park cost more than NT$200 million.
The display at Taipei 101, however, fell below expectations and has since set off a polarized debate.
In an interview with Business Today published on Wednesday, Cai was quoted as saying that he had been “defeated by the efficiency of the Taipei City Government.”
He said the day before the show, all the fireworks still had not arrived in Taiwan, so he did not have enough time to prepare and set up all the fireworks.
According to the article, Cai said his biggest regret was that the flares he had planned to use to light up the whole city at the end of the show were not even installed because there simply was not enough time. That meant that the show lacked an obvious finale, he said.
Furthermore, Taipei 101’s management decided to cancel the Chinese characters that were to be written by fireworks. The reasons for this were that the process was quite complicated, the article said, adding that because the two parties had signed a confidentiality agreement, the wording of the contract remains unknown.
The article stated that the NT$60 million spent on the show failed to impress not because of its design or because some fireworks did not go off, but because of the administrative inefficiency of the Taipei City Government.
Cai claimed in the interview that he had accepted the Taipei 101 assignment as a challenge, but that he had never expected that a lot of the fireworks would not even have been installed by the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, making it impossible for him to realize the magnificent display he had envisaged.
The government’s procedures for reviewing and approving fireworks meant that the Taipei City Government had to obtain approval for the display from the fire department. Since the fireworks had still not arrived in Taiwan by the evening before the show, it was too late to install the 110,000 fireworks.
“All the fireworks were transported by sea and the ship was left waiting in international waters for a very long time,” the interview quoted Cai as saying.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday played down the dispute, saying the blame attributed to the city government in the article had been a “misunderstanding,” declining to comment further.
Taipei City Government spokesperson Chao Hsin-ping (趙心屏) said Cai and his explosives team applied to the Fire Department for the go-ahead for the display in mid-November and the department had approved the application as quickly as possible.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CHEN CHING-MIN AND HUANG TUN-SHUO
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