Fireworks and Chinese cultural heritage: contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang
Originally uploaded by Bromirski

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, says Wikipedia.

He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged.

See numerous videos of his gunpowder events on Youtube.

Cai initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature "explosion events". In 1995, he moved to New York.

Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks.

Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing." Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment."[2]

Cai is one of the most well-known and influential Chinese contemporary artists, having represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Cai's participation in the Beijing Olympics has built a great reputation among common Chinese people.