Cai Guo-Qiang
The artist of gunpowder.
Cai Guo-Qiang paints with gunpowder and makes fireworks as art. He directed the fireworks at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou in Fujian province, an old port city. His father was a painter and calligrapher who worked in a bookshop. Growing up he experienced the Cultural Revolution, but also traditional folk beliefs and fireworks. He studied stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy from 1981 to 1985.
In 1986 he moved to Japan, where he lived for nine years. There he began working with gunpowder, a Chinese material with a long history. He spreads gunpowder over large sheets of paper, covers them with cardboard and ignites it. The explosion leaves black and brown patterns, traces of smoke and scorch marks, which he calls gunpowder drawings. He also made the series Projects for Extraterrestrials, large explosions in the landscape that could be seen from space.
In 1995 he moved to New York. In 1999 he won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for a reconstruction of a well-known Chinese propaganda sculpture. His installations often feature animals: in Head On of 2006, 99 wolves leap in an arc straight into a glass wall. In Inopportune: Stage One of 2004, cars fly through the air with light tubes radiating from them, like an explosion in slow motion.
He is also known for fireworks as art. At the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing he directed the fireworks, including a series of gigantic footprints of fire that strode across the city towards the stadium. In 2015 he realised an old dream, Sky Ladder, a ladder of fire that rose 500 metres into the sky from an island near Quanzhou, dedicated to his hundred-year-old grandmother. The event is the subject of a documentary film.
Cai Guo-Qiang has exhibited at the world's largest museums, including a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. He has made gunpowder an artistic language and combines Chinese tradition, cosmology and contemporary politics in a way that appeals to a wide audience.