ExhibitionGunpowder drawings

Cai Guo-Qiang is best known for his use of gunpowder. Originally invented by the Chinese as an “elixir of immortality,” gunpowder changed the course of military technology and thus is arguably China’s most consequential scientific advance. Fireworks, a related invention, have long been used to mark auspicious occasions and frighten away evil spirits. Cai mines gunpowder’s charged identification with China, its original medicinal use, and its ongoing equation with violence.

Explosives are central to Cai’s signature gunpowder drawings, which are made by laying gunpowder and fuses on fibrous paper and igniting them in a blast that creates charred residue of the original matter. Gunpowder is also the essential material for his explosion events, which are mostly outdoor, site-specific pyrotechnic displays, often on a monumental scale. Although his work can be related to Conceptual art, performance, and Land art, Cai extends each art form—whether gunpowder drawing or explosion event— toward a new matrix. Where other artists have used fire, smoke, or burned matter to make objects of art, Cai uses explosives to directly manifest the pure force of energy, not to induce art but as an art form itself.

From the mid-1980s, when he began to experiment with gunpowder, these acts of what he has called “unpredictable splendor” combined his evolving interests in war and Dada, hazard and chance, spectacle and performance. Significantly, Cai couched his artistic breakthrough in the rhetoric of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. He sought to connect, in his words, “the invisible world” to art, linking his practices to a metaphysical study of cosmic meridians of energy currents; primordial states of chaos; transformation; and the nature of formless matter.

As his methodology evolved, Cai articulated mutability and instability as inherent structures of art; for him, all states of an artwork’s creation, including its destruction, coexist in the work itself. These ideas won him critical acclaim in Japan and Europe, where he first showed gunpowder drawings and and realized explosion events in the early 1990s.

Shadow: Pray for Protection, 1985-86
Shadow: Pray for Protection, 1986 More information about the work

Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials no. 9, 1991
Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials no. 9, 1991 More information about the work
Extension, 1994
Extension Drawing, 1994 More information about the work
Drawings for Footprints of History, 28-11-2008
Drawings for Footprints of History, 28-11-2008 More information about the work

Bilbao’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 2009

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