Contemporary artist Cai Guoqiang paints the sky using gunpowder

Gunpowder, considered one of China’s most significant contributions to the world, has always fascinated Cai Guo-Qiang. Growing up, explosions from cannon blasts, artillery batteries firing into the air and festive firework displays were commonplace, and he recalls the hand of his classmates stained red from filling firecrackers in factories.

A child of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who participated in propaganda activities, he found an outlet through the medium of gunpowder. Playing with fireworks set him free amidst the oppressive and restrictive context.

The 63-year-old artist explains, “The question is whether you use gunpowder violently or peacefully, and also whether you can liberate yourself from this very restrained society.”

He adds: “So you have a dialogue with gunpowder, and then through your work, you can find another link. Additionally, using gunpowder is in direct contrast to my father, who was a very conservative, timid intellectual. My work breaks away from that.” 

Between cultures

Today a Chinese global art star living and working in New York City, Guo-Qiang is a cross-cultural artist working on universal ideas and themes and recognised for his large-scale gunpowder paintings, where he ignites explosives directly onto canvas, and ephemeral multicoloured daytime fireworks performances of epic proportions imbued with an elaborate sense of theatricality.

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he sent giant footprints walking across the night sky. A decade later, he drew inspiration from Botticelli’s masterpiece Primavera to illuminate Florence with his City of Flowers in the Sky pyrotechnic display in broad daylight, depicting thousands of Renaissance flowers.

The nature of his work is fleeting: one second it’s there, the next it’s gone. “In my creations, I always chase after uncertainty or the unstable factor, the troublemaker that sparks the surprising element that I do not anticipate,” he points out. He was the first to introduce gunpowder to contemporary art, transforming the tension, fear and recklessness of destruction into beauty, and redefining the possibilities of what art can be.

Drawn from life

The perpetual cycle of life and death is evident throughout Guo-Qiang’s oeuvre as he explores connections with invisible powers. Inspired by Chinese traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, feng shui, TCM, qi gong, Confucianism and shan shui, a style of traditional Chinese painting that depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints, he communes with the cosmos, the universe and his ancestors.

“I have a curiosity for the unseen world and unseen energies. They have become the foundation of my art,” he notes. His pieces create a link between the material and spiritual worlds, using the things we can see to search for what we cannot see.

Perhaps his best-known work is his explosive Sky Ladder that he stretched a half-kilometre high, connecting the earth with the universe, which became the subject of an acclaimed 2016 Netflix documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald.

Like a stairway to heaven reaching up into the dark expanse of the night, composed of a multi-stranded firework connective wire suspended from a hot air balloon, it lit up successively in red tones in an 80-second performance.

First conceived in 1994, it was only after three unsuccessful attempts due to bad weather, bureaucracy or safety concerns that the right location and conditions finally came together in Huiyu Island Harbour in his home province of Fujian.

The piece was dedicated to his 100-year-old grandmother, who was too ill to see it in person but was able to watch it via mobile phone before passing away a month later.

A tiny spark

Born in Quanzhou, Fujian province, in 1957, Guo-Qiang recalls his father Cai Ruiqin, an amateur calligrapher and painter, who managed a bookstore and was a collector of old books and manuscripts, burning books in the basement at night, afraid he would get caught with them. At the same time, he observed his father’s enjoyment and freedom every time he practised cursive script calligraphy.

“As a child growing up, I was scared of explosions and firecrackers. It pushed me to explore what this was about and learn new things every time,” he says. “Gunpowder explosives are very hard to control, so the relationship between the artist’s hand and gunpowder is very much like dating: it’s very unpredictable.”

After studying stage design at Shanghai Theatre Academy, Guo-Qiang settled in Japan in 1986 and developed new gunpowder techniques over nine years, exploring the many possibilities of his beloved medium. In 1995, he moved to New York on an artist exchange programme, a grant from the Asian Cultural Council for a residency at the P.S.1 Studio Program.

Today, he still works in New York City with his 15 assistants in a studio in Manhattan’s East Village that was renovated by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA as well as with Grucci Fireworks on Long Island and dozens of pyrotechnicians from China.

Last winter, his major exhibition, Odyssey and Homecoming in Beijing’s Palace Museum, marking the 600th anniversary of the palace complex, traced his journey through Western art history as he dialogued with European masterpieces. More recently, he is slated to be involved in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Dazzling homage

In September 2020, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Hennessy X.O – Hennessy’s iconic cognac comprising long- aged “eaux de vie” to perfect the blend created by cellar master Emile Fillioux at the request of Maurice Hennessy – the spirit house, founded in 1765 by Richard Hennessy, reached out to Guo-Qiang to mastermind an explosive, artistic spectacle in Cognac, the birthplace of cognac as part of its A World Odyssey anniversary programme.

A year and a half in the making, the three-act performance, entitled The Birth of Tragedy, in homage to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work of dramatic theory of the same name served as a message of hope and unity during a period of uncertainty and was live- streamed to a global audience – a first for the maison and the artist.

Working on the water for the first time, Guo-Qiang staged his 15-minute show from the Charente River that runs through the town and had once been the channel through which its cognac travelled to the rest of the world.

“Seeing the barrel workshop along the river in Cognac, I immediately envisioned a picture of wine barrels floating and winding through the river, like a dragon!” he exclaims. “The three-act fireworks unfold as if on a scroll of calligraphy, a piece of poetic writing and an act of the drama.”

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A total of 20,000 fireworks exploded into the daytime sky from 150 oak barrels floating on the river, starting with a colourful overture of orange oak-coloured fireworks, and green and lavender smoke signifying the spontaneous and romantic ethos of France, like a group of pleasure-seeking fairies spreading their wings to embrace nature, followed by displays influenced by Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai, wild cursive script, Dionysus – the Greek god of wine – and Picasso.

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