Cai Guo-Qiang to Launch PST ART with Fireworks Extravaganza

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Getty has commissioned Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese artist known for his gunpowder paintings and daytime fireworks, to create a spectacle for the launch of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Previously known as Pacific Standard Time, PST ART encompasses more than 70 exhibitions at museums and institutions across America’s West Coast region.

Cai will combine nearly 10,000 mini firework shells installed in the Memorial Coliseum’s seating bowl with his daytime fireworks—great clouds of colourful pigments created through controlled explosions—and over 1,000 choreographed drones equipped with their own pyrotechnics in a performance titled WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART.

WE ARE will take place at dusk on 15 September.

‘Cai’s work is explosive, expressive, and unprecedented in scale,’ said Katherine E. Fleming, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust. ‘Lighting up the sky of Los Angeles, this performance will signal PST ART’s potential to reach audiences far and wide.’

The event will utilise Cai’s custom AI model, cAI™, to tell a story about AI’s revelation of a ‘heavenly secret’ and Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods.

‘Today, as humanity grapples with the swift advancement of technologies epitomised by AI, culture and the arts appear particularly powerless,’ Cai said. ‘I hope WE ARE will stand as a grand gesture of the art world integrating the virtual with the real in the era of AI, and also as a powerful voice and decisive action in these turbulent times.’

An exhibition of Cai’s gunpowder works that delves into the nature of the material and his evolving process will also feature in PST ART. Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey will take up most of the USC Pacific Asia Museum.

‘With any artist it is important to understand their materials and process, and with Cai, the materials are so unusual and groundbreaking that getting to know them provides a whole new level of understanding of his work,’ said Rachel Rivenc, lead curator and Head of Conservation and Preservation at Getty Research Institute. —[O]

Main image: Ignition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, 2015. Courtesy Cai Studio. Photo: Kamiyama Yosuke.