CAI GUO-QIANG (b. 1957, Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China) lives and works in New York.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is both scholarly and politically charged. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale, and the development of his signature explosion events, exemplified in his series, Projects for Extraterrestrials. Throughout his career, Cai has developed a unique aesthetic iconography that draws freely from a wide variety of materials, symbols, narratives, and traditions: elements of feng shui, Chinese medicine and philosophy, images of dragons and tigers, roller coasters, computers, and vending machines.
Cai studied at the Shanghai Drama Institute and attended the Studio Program at P.S.1 in New York in 1995. Among the artist's recent solo exhibitions are Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (2006); Head On, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2006); Inopportune: Stage One, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2005), and Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, a retrospective exhibition inaugurated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with subsequent touring venues in Beijing and Bilbao. Cai also curated the first China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2005), and is currently Art Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Olympics ceremonies in Beijing.