The exhibitionExplosion events

Cai Guo-Qiang is best known for his explosion events. In 1989, he began using gunpowder and fuse lines to create outdoor explosions for public audiences using the ground and existing structures as a framework. These early works lasted between one and fifteen seconds. Since then, Cai’s practice has evolved dramatically. He now produces aerial explosion events that are often developed with professional yrotechnicians.Most recently the artist has harnessed computerized technology to create more elaborate explosion imagery, whose effects last as long as twenty minutes. The explosion events are usually realized through commissions by museums, art biennials, or national and international agencies like the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games,for which Cai is serving as a core member of the creative team and Art Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies. Cai’s explosion events are primarily created with gunpowder, while others are designed as celebratory spectacles in the tradition of fireworks displays (Cai derides this term).

But they are also contemporary works of art whose conceptual, allegorical, and metaphorical narratives express the artist’s critical interests.

Gunpowder, which is a mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur, is China’s most famous invention, literally meaning “fire medicine” in Chinese. It was originally discovered by Taoist alchemists in search of an imperial “elixir of immortality,” and 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 and simultaneously alludes to its original medicinal use and its ongoing equation with violence. Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9 (1992, cat. no. 20), staged at a German military base, uses the Chinese healing arts of feng shui (a system of geomancy) and the seismic waves produced by the ground explosion to metaphorically discharge the negative energy accumulated at the site. Like many of the explosion events, the underlying principle and essential experience of Fetus Movement II is transformation through conflict. Other projects, such asThe Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 (1994, cat. no. 22), focus on the context, culture, and interaction of the artist with the local community. Both the chemical process of explosion and the creation, destruction, and disappearance of the work itself are designed to produce a physical and conceptual catharsis.

Cai’s explosion events are related in sheer scale to site-specific Land art projects, where art disrupts the land by employing it to radical aesthetic use. Cai extends this practice to take in the sky, which represents the ancient space of heavens and the contemporary arenas of war and terror. But whereas most Land art is static and semi-permanent, Cai’s explosion events are spectacularly transient. Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (1993, cat. no. 21) was a vast event that took place on a single night in the Gobi desert. It consisted of 10,000 meters of fuse lines and 60 kilograms of gunpowder that volunteers laid along the desert ridges extending from the westernmost ruins of the Great Wall. The gunpowder was ignited at dusk, creating a line of fire that cut across the vast expanse of desert, momentarily uniting the forty thousand local people who gathered to see this demonstration of public art.

As time-based works created for live public audiences, Cai’s explosion events also operate as performances, whose impact—thunderous bangs, fiery light, smoke, and floating debris—conjures both violent chaos and ritual celebration. For both the artist and his audience, the moment of explosion is severely and creatively disorienting: Time pauses and the mind goes blank in the face of such unpredictable force. “This disruption of banal consciousness,” Cai explains, “is something that is worthy of use by an artist because it has the power to create a great experience.” Finally, as with all ephemeral art, the explosion events become known only through their documentation—photographs, videos, and drawings.

Cai’s explosion events are often titled by series, such ass Projects for Extraterrestrials, of which there are at least thirty-three projects to date, including unrealized projects; Projects for Humankind, of which there are at least five projects to date, including unrealized projects; and Projects for the 20th Century, among which there are at least three projects, including his critical work The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century (1996, cat. no. 26).

The titles tell us something about the scale and perspective of Cai’s thinking. The giant patterns of fire on earth signify a code, or the aspiration to communicate a code, to “extraterrestrials,” by which Cai means realities or forces that are alien to our mundane existence. By harnessing fire as an ancient and constant element of geological formation, social ritual and religious purification, and life’s destruction, Cai’s explosion events express a profound interest in both ancient and modern cosmology and an expansive vision of art as a science of transformation. As spectacles of primal power, the explosion events produce an experience of temporal dislocation, a momentary trance when we feel ourselves to be at the beginning and the end of life on earth.

Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9, 1992
Movimiento fetal II: Proyecto para extraterrestres nº 9, 1992 More information about the work
The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century, 2008 (1996)
El siglo de los hongos atómicos y obras recientes More information about the work
Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, 2008
Huellas de la historia: proyecto de fuegos artificiales para la ceremonia de apertura de los Juegos Olímpicos Beijing, 2008 More information about the work

Bilbao’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 2009

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