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Charmaine Yu

Multicoloured fireworks, arranged in a meandering line that resembled a dragon crawling along a pastoral mountain ridge, exploded at the foot of the Himalayas in September.
Cai Guo-qiang, the 67-year-old Chinese artist behind the spectacle, has long been a global heavyweight in the contemporary arts. For decades, the arsonist-artist best known for setting his work alight was deemed to have perfected the delicate art of maintaining official approval in both the West and mainland China.
This ability to transcend cultural and geographic boundaries has seen his work acquired by the most prestigious museums in the West. He was the visual and special effects director for the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the first contemporary artist to hold a solo exhibition at Beijing’s Palace Museum in 2020.
The project in Gyantse county, under the administration of Shigatse in China’s Tibet autonomous region, however, has singed that carefully maintained reputation.
The high-altitude firework display, titled Rising Dragon and sponsored by outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx, sparked complaints over environmental damage, given the plateau’s fragile ecosystem.
Cai and Arc’teryx were fined by the local government, and Tibetan activists staged a protest outside the Centre Pompidou art space in Paris, calling the work an act of “cultural violence”.

So who is this artistic provocateur, and how did he become an art world celebrity?
Cai was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, a port city in China’s Fujian province, and he grew up during the Cultural Revolution, which was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until 1976.
His formative years were marked by frequent explosions, from cannon fire to celebratory fireworks, and he understood early on the dual nature of gunpowder as being “destruction and reconstruction”.
A childhood formed by social turmoil suggests why Cai’s work can be viewed as an exploration into the tension between patriotic pride and political dissatisfaction. In 2019, the artist told CNN that “when I was young, the constraints of Chinese society and my personal timid and cautious nature both drove me to seek a means to go against control”.
While he has worked with various art media, it was in 1984 that Cai introduced gunpowder to his work to create allegorical commentaries intertwined with existentialism and sociopolitics.
During his time in Japan, from 1986 to 1995, he began mastering the technique of gunpowder drawings, where he would lay out canvases, arrange gunpowder, fuses and stencils, and then ignite the composition. The resulting scorches, burns and smoke residue became powerful, almost primeval, imprints of an ephemeral explosion.
“Gunpowder has an inherent uncertainty and uncontrollability, and is an important means for me to relieve myself of constraint,” he said in the same 2019 interview.

Cai has lived in the United States since 1995, when he received a fellowship and artist residency from the New York-based Asian Cultural Council.
His relocation to the US helped him gain entry to a former nuclear test site in Nevada, where he staged a series of miniature “mushroom cloud” performance pieces, titled The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century (1996).
His multifaceted background has moulded him into a cultural bridge-builder of the art world. He has fused Taoist cosmology with modern astrophysics, even Maoist revolutionary icons, to produce art that is at once philosophical, political and dazzling.
He was awarded the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale for Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard (1999), a sculptural installation and one of his politically incendiary pieces.
He commissioned Chinese sculptors to recreate parts of the original Rent Collection Courtyard, a life-size sculptural installation from 1965 depicting a cruel landlord exploiting peasants, which became a powerful symbol of Maoist propaganda.
Notably, Cai’s sculptures were intentionally left unfinished to disintegrate over time, commenting on themes of cultural history and the evolving role of art and politics.
The work was criticised in China, where one critic denounced him for mocking the Cultural Revolution, but he was hailed in the West as a provocative interrogator of history.

Consequently, Cai is often grouped with other leading Chinese contemporary artists such as Huang Yongping and Ai Weiwei, all of whom have looked beyond their birth country to create works that resonate globally while still drawing on Chinese philosophy.
While he has stated that his art is not “in the service of politics”, his collaborations with the mainland Chinese government inevitably invite political interpretation and scrutiny.
The artist has worked on several state-backed projects in China, including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics, both in Beijing. In 2020, his “Odyssey and Homecoming” became the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist inside Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Responding to critics who frame such projects as propagandist and the loss of artistic independence, Cai has defended himself by saying that “coming back to China does not make this a national project”. An artist is like a ship, and the ship “stops at different ports”.
Cai’s ship indeed seems to discover new ports endlessly.
In 2021, his non-fungible token (NFT) project Transient Eternity – 101 Ignitions of Gunpowder Paintings marked his entry into the crypto art space. Unafraid to explore new worlds, he saw this medium as one that aligned with the core philosophies of his art: transience, eternity and energy.
His ship would venture further into the world of techno-art when he created his 2025 exhibition of “gunpowder” works for the Art Macao Festival. The works were AI-generated through a model that Cai and his team had been working on for seven years.

“Through exploring gunpowder as material, I have been having dialogues with unseen energy,” he explained at the exhibition. “When using gunpowder, I feel this sense of surprise because it is a very difficult material to control. All these feelings are very much the same when I engage with AI.”
Regardless of his many experiments, Cai remains most recognisable for his pyrotechnic mastery.
Perhaps his most famous work has been Sky Ladder (2015), where a 500-metre (1,640-foot) ladder was lifted into the dawning sky of his hometown. Rigged with fireworks, the ignited ladder seemingly connected the terrestrial to the cosmic, and he dedicated this piece to his grandmother.

Though tender, it did not escape the teeth of controversy as he executed this piece without government authorisation.
The piece tested the ethics of artistic defiance and the boundary between personal passion and institutional compliance – a theme that would rear its head again a decade later on the opposite side of the coin, when Cai did receive official authorisation for his Himalayas piece.
Cai’s career reflects a fascinating push-pull between the limits of scale, material and impact. His gunpowder works are simultaneously violent and beautiful, ephemeral but frightful.
While blowback from Rising Dragon continues, discourse surrounding his career will undoubtedly remain divisive.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Cai addressed concerns about US-China tensions head-on. The gunpowder provocateur is worried, but “it is at these moments that the works of an artist become particularly meaningful”.


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Outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx worked with Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang to set off fireworks at the foot of the Himalayas in a publicity stunt. We delve into who Cai is and why he is sometimes seen as controversial. Photo: Handout

Fireworks explode over the skyline during a show by Cai Guo-qiang titled City of Flowers in the Sky, in Florence, Italy, in November 2018. Photo: ANSA via AP

Taroko Gorge (2009) by Cai, on display at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2017. Photo: Nora Tam

Cai’s Heritage (2013) at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Photo: courtesy of Natasha Harth/GoMA

A visitor looks at AI-created gunpowder paintings at Cai’s exhibition at the MGM Macau for the Art Macao Festival. Photo: Handout

A still from Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, a documentary on the artist. Photo: Netflix

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Travellers Among Mountains and Streams, by Fan Kuan, is another of the most celebrated examples of dashan dashui. Photo: Corbis via Getty Images

Watching the Deer by a Pine Shaded Stream, a landscape painting by Ma Yuan. Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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An AI artwork created by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst called Embedding Study 1 & 2 in the sale exhbition. Photo: AFP

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The Chinese artist, known for setting his gunpowder art alight, has stunned many with his work but has also drawn criticism over the years


The Chinese artist, known for setting his gunpowder art alight, has stunned many with his work but has also drawn criticism over the years.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Chinese artist, known for setting his gunpowder art alight, has stunned many with his work but has also drawn criticism over the years

The Chinese artist, known for setting his gunpowder art alight, has stunned many with his work but has also drawn criticism over the years