Arc'teryx Under Fire for Pyrotechnic Display in Tibet

The outdoor attire company Arc’teryx has made waves in recent years, attracting a growing following and some impressive cultural cachet. Arc’teryx recently decided to do two things that plenty of clothing companies do: collaborate with an artist and draw attention to a particular place. In this case, the location was the Himalayas and the artist was Cai Guo-Qiang, who sometimes uses gunpowder in his work.

You can tell where this is going, right? Guo-Qiang came up with a memorable installation that evoked the shape of a dragon and followed a path up a hill. It was a striking image — but the fact that it took place in an otherwise idyllic landscape left many observers understandably alarmed.

As Phoebe Zhang reported in the South China Morning Post, local officials in Tibet plan to investigate the pyrotechnics and are looking into whether the event did any damage to the landscape. Zhang noted that the fireworks used in the installation were in line with guidelines related to the 2022 Winter Olympics. Arc’teryx also told the South China Morning Post that it had cleaned up the area after the fireworks went off.

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Since then, Arc’teryx has issued an apology — though that has not been without controversy of its own. In a statement posted on Instagram, the company argued that the event “was out of line with Arc’teryx’s values” and that the company would seek to “change the way we work to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Writing in The Washington Post, Leo Sands and Lyric Li noted that Arc’teryx had posted differently phrased statements in English and Chinese, a decision that has led to additional criticism. It is not strange for a company to work with an artist to make something eye-catching — but this particular combination of medium and location was less than ideal.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…