Psssh! Cai Guo-Qiang has lit a blowtorch. He pauses, poised like a boxer, then leans down to light a fuse, which leads to a canvas sprinkled with gunpowder. Pfff! Flames blaze out and puffs of smoke rise up to the ceiling of the artist’s studio — a cavernous, light-filled barn in Chester, New Jersey, purchased from an Olympian equestrian.
The picture is revealed: dramatic, blue-black flowers have been seared into the canvas. Cai compares these gunpowder paintings to “lovemaking”. “There’s no planning in lovemaking,” he says with a laugh. “You just go with the flow.” And however much you try to prepare, “there’s always an element of surprise — losing control of the gunpowder.”
Handsome and lean at 67, his hair cropped short, today Cai wears a striped top, jeans and chunky yellow sandals. He smiles warmly as we sip tea in his Frank Gehry-designed house: redwood topped with titanium roofs, its huge glass windows looking out on to the countryside.
Cai is famed not just for his charred paintings (which sell for millions) but also for complex pyrotechnic explosions. In these fireworks, trails of smoke and dye are shaped into flashing flowers in the sky. In one work, he “extended” the Great Wall of China by lighting a 10km-long fuse along the Gobi Desert. In another, he raised a blazing 1,650ft ladder up to the sky on a giant balloon.
He knows how to make a scene — whether embedding a 20,000-litre lake of jet-black ink into an art gallery, or recreating Noah’s Ark with a deathly twist (fabricated bodies of pandas and leopards slumped over the boat’s sides) and sailing it down the Huangpu River in Shanghai.
For his next trick, coinciding with Art Basel in Paris later this month, Cai will set the Centre Pompidou alight, ahead of the gallery’s major refurbishment project.
He is enigmatic on the exact details for “The Last Carnival”. In preparation for it, Cai consulted his own custom-developed artificial intelligence model cAI (pronounced “AI Cai”), which suggested “a last carnival showing a possible future art history where AI and humans create together.”
An encrypted message will explode across the Pompidou’s facade, Cai says, imitating the sound of firework shells going off: “don don don.” That message will be revealed when the Pompidou reopens.
Cai shrugs off anxieties about the use of AI, which he even uses to paint, via a robotic arm. “It’s not up to the artist to choose if they are going to embrace or be cautious of AI,” he says. “If you can be replaced by AI as an artist, then you’re meant to be replaced.”
Cai was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, a port city in China’s Fujian province. He grew up surrounded by the noise of firecrackers, set off to mark festivals, marriages and births.
“I am not a brave person,” Cai says. “I wasn’t even brave enough to light firecrackers myself. My grandmother was much braver. She would hold my hand to ignite the firecrackers. And then later I realised that, just like my father, I had a very timid and cautious personality.”
His father ran a bookshop. Cai would often sit on his lap, watching as he smoked and painted miniature mountain landscapes in ink on matchboxes. During the Cultural Revolution, Cai would help his father burn books at night, fearful that they would be discovered by Red Guards. By day, he painted stage sets for propaganda plays.
I was looking for a material to liberate myself from my timid personality. I also wanted to liberate myself from a society that was very oppressive
Cai has a puckish sense of humour, peppering our conversation with anecdotes. He tells me about a friend he remembers playing with, whose mother was notoriously bad tempered. One day, the friend’s father died in an accident. There was a rumour, Cai says, his face mischievous, “that the man died during sex — he couldn’t stop, so he died of exhaustion”. The mother, he continues, “couldn’t bear all the rumours. She went to a temple and became a nun.”
That wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I say, when I asked about his childhood memories.
“It’s one of those things that has left a deep impression,” he replies. “Since I was a child, I’ve worried that I might experience something like that.”
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Later, he moved to study in Shanghai, and grew his hair long. First, he experimented with burning his paintings. “I was looking for a material to liberate myself from my timid personality.” He also wanted “to liberate myself from a society that was very oppressive”.
He started firing “small rockets, which were children’s toys — pssh pssh”, he says, imitating their fizzing noises, on to the canvas. One time, his grandmother had to smother his burning painting with a rag.
His move to study in Japan in the late 1980s was formative. Here, he began experimenting with gunpowder in earnest. In 1994, for part of a series titled Projects for Extraterrestrials, he twisted together six 5,000-metre-long gunpowder fuses and lit up the Pacific Ocean horizon, off the coast of Iwaki, Fukushima.
Cai landed in New York on an art scholarship in 1995: “As a foreign artist coming to this country, I soon felt myself being infused into this big hotpot of different cultures.”
Soon after arriving, he smuggled firecracker powder into the Nevada nuclear test site, and posed in the desert, one hand outstretched as he fired off a miniature mushroom cloud.
Other works from that time addressed China’s increasing prominence on the world stage. In “The Dragon Has Arrived!” (1997), he gently poked fun at his homeland’s leap into the future, transforming a wooden pagoda into a rocket taking flight.
He worries about today’s US-China tensions. But, he says, “it is at these moments that the works of an artist become particularly meaningful.”
During a performance, “Interspecies Love Letter”, at the Kennedy Center earlier this year — held shortly after Trump’s takeover of the cultural institution — Cai’s fireworks lit up the Potomac River. That night, he read from a speech John F Kennedy delivered in 1962: “I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.”
That kind of upbeat appeal rarely triggers moral conundrums — but two incidents are noteworthy. Cai was condemned for working with the Chinese government when he designed the fireworks for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony. Pyrotechnic bursts resembling giant footprints traced a path over the capital, leading to the national stadium.
“I compromised a lot,” Cai says now, his voice serious. His original vision was of a giant extraterrestrial who “steps across borders freely”. “From the perspective of the cosmos,” he says, “you don’t see those borders on Earth.” Along the way, he was told that the rhetoric would need to become “something that’s like: the world has come to China.”
His latest critics include environmentalists and Tibetans. In the 1980s, Cai proposed lining Montagne Sainte-Victoire in southern France, so beloved by Cézanne, with 15kg of gunpowder and a 200-metre fuse.
It’s not up to the artist to choose if they are going to embrace AI. If you can be replaced by AI as an artist, then you’re meant to be replaced
He explains: “It was me, as a young artist, telling the world that I’m here to challenge a major figure in art history — but also, in a way, transcending humanity and connecting with outer space.”
Cai was denied permission to light up Sainte-Victoire. The wild plan went unrealised for decades until last month, when he finally staged “Rising Dragon” in partnership with the outdoor brand Arc’teryx in the mountains of Tibet, coloured smoke tracing Himalayan ridge lines. It swiftly sparked a backlash for allegedly disturbing a fragile ecosystem and violating mountains considered sacred by Tibetan Buddhists. The brand apologised. “My studio and I,” Cai also wrote, “humbly accept all criticisms.”
Tibetan protesters disrupted the opening night of Cai’s exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey, London; inside the gallery, gunpowder paintings ranged from visions of hot pink poppies to woozier abstractions. Several protesters told me that they thought the artist was exploiting a region restricted by tight Chinese government rule.
There’s no denying that Cai’s spectacle in Tibet was culturally insensitive — but perhaps, also, the age of artists fashioning extravaganzas out of land and light is fast falling out of fashion. Even Cai is candid about the bureaucratic and political demands of staging his outdoor explosions. “The room for improvisation is very limited,” he says. It’s why working on canvas remains his first love, allowing him to “express something that’s more spontaneous”.
Back in his studio, Cai adds a few finishing scorches to a new gunpowder painting. Working on a more intimate scale, he tells me, is a way of keeping him tethered to his “childhood imagination of being an artist”. I watch as he swings the blowtorch up like a brush. Green fumes begin to drift off the surface of the picture.
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