Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theater Academy, and his work has since crossed multiple mediums within art, including drawing, installation, video and performance art. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his signature explosion events. Drawing upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, these projects and events aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them, utilizing a site-specific approach to culture and history. He currently lives and works in New York.
Read MoreCai was awarded the Japan Cultural Design Prize in 1995 and the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. In the following years, he has received the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize (2007), the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (2009), and AICA’s first place for Best Project in a Public Space for Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms (2010). He also curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, and held the distinguished position as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2012, Cai was honored as one of five Laureates for the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, an award that recognizes lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel Prize. Additionally, he was also among the five artists who received the first U.S. Department of State - Medal of Arts award for his outstanding commitment to international cultural exchange.
Among his many solo exhibitions and projects include Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006 and his retrospective I Want to Believe, which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in February 2008 before traveling to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in August 2008 and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao in March 2009. In 2011, Cai appeared in the solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, his first ever in a Middle Eastern country. In 2012, the artist appeared in three solo exhibitions: Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Cai Guo-Qiang: Spring (Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China), and A Clan of Boats (Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark).
His first-ever solo exhibition in Brazil, Cai Guo-Qiang: Da Vincis do Povo, went on a three-city tour around the country in 2013, traveling from Brasilia to São Paulo before reaching its final destination in Rio de Janeiro. In October 2013, Cai created One Night Stand (Aventure d’un Soir), an explosion event for Nuit Blanche, a citywide art and culture festival organized by the city of Paris.
His exhibition, Falling Back to Earth opened in November 2013 at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Australia. He currently lives and works in New York.
Ocula News Cai Guo-Qiang Explodes Fireworks Over VR Forbidden City Beijing, 21 December 2020 The work was created for Cai's solo show, curated by Sir Simon Schama, at Beijing's Palace Museum.
Ocula Feature China’s Post-Intranet Artists Get Personal By Sam Gaskin, Auckland China's post-80s artists are no longer all that 'young', nor do they much need that moniker. With the oldest of that generation fast approaching 40, to call them young would be misleading given how rapidly many of them rose to prominence during the tail-end of China's foreign collector-powered art boom and subsequent influx of domestic collectors....
Ocula Conversation Cai Guo-Qiang By Laura Thomson, Auckland Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He was a child during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and strongly influenced by society's vision for social utopia. Cai trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Acadmey. He left China in 1986, spending almost 9 years as a young artist in...
Ocula Conversation Dakis Joannou We are not playing power games or trying to dominate the Greek art scene. We are just here and we are open for people to share in what we are doing.
Related Press FLORA COMMEDIA CAI GUO-QIANG 1 February 2019, ArtAsiaPacific Thunderous rumbles marked the opening of Flora Commedia: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Uffizi as 50,000 fireworks filled the sky above Florence with cascades of multicolored blooms during the pyrotechnic event City of Flowers in the Sky, one of Cai's most spectacularly choreographed to date, inspired by the work of Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli....
Related Press Now Jonathan Yeo is using Virtual Reality to make art 11 December 2017, GQ In celebration of its 250 th birthday, London's Royal Academy Of Arts explores the historic practice of life drawing in a revolutionary way. Beginning with the Academy's 18 th -century origins, From Life continues to the present and, most intriguingly, moves into the future. Historical paintings hang alongside works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Jenny...
Related Press From Innovation to Provocation, China’s Artists on a Global Path 6 October 2017, The New York Times Strange to say, although China has 1.4 billion people, it has only one artist, Ai Weiwei. Or so you'd think if you followed the Western news media. Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum wants to correct that impression. With work by some 70 Chinese-born artists and collectives filling most of the...
Related Press Cai Guo-Qiang’s Fireflies Lights Up Philadelphia 21 September 2017, Whitewall Over the past decade, public art has flourished in our cities. Sculptures and ephemeral performances illuminate our public spaces while questioning societal norms. And when participatory and interactive, public art leaves a long-lasting impression in our minds. This was surely the case for whoever experienced Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The...
Related Video & Audio Netflix documentary looks at the career of Cai Guo-Qiang 3 October 2016, The Art Newspaper A documentary produced by Netflix to be released widely in October looks at the career of the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The film is titled _Sky Ladder _after a monumental 2015 work of the same name, in which Cai ignited a 1,650 ft. ladder of fireworks that reached into the sky above Huiyu Island Harbour in Quanzhou. 'I want to connect the...
