Light My Fire: Artist Cai Guo-Qiang

One of the most exciting artists to emerge during our time is Cai Guo-Qiang. The Chinese artist paints with gunpowder when he's not staging open-air 'explosion events.' At this summer's Beijing Olympics, he will be director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies.

“There’s a lot of talk about the content of my work, about the subject matter or the historical background. But there’s not a real in-depth investigation into the visual impact. It’s through visual impact that you transmit these ideas. And it’s through visual impact that this pain is felt, and you can actually elicit a very direct response from the audience, a very strong response. But it’s the treatment of all the elements that has the power to do this.”
— Cai Guo-Qiang

Some of his work:

"Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows" 1998

“’Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows’ uses three thousand arrows on a boat that’s hanging. I’ve used the image of the arrow quite a lot. And I also like to hang things up. Perhaps it’s the physical response one has with an object that’s been pierced through—and then also to the change of gravity when you lift things off the ground.”
— Cai Guo-Qiang

“Ever since September 11th, the idea of terrorism is always on our minds. It’s ever so present. And while car explosions have been around for a long time, they have a heightened sense of reality in our minds. ‘Inopportune’ obviously has a direct reference to these conditions that we live in now. But making an installation that is so beautiful and mesmerizing that also borrows the image of the car bomb already has inappropriateness in it…So maybe in this way it’s kind of unfashionable or inappropriate, or ‘inopportune.’”
— Cai Guo-Qiang

Animals:

Also interesting is the black rainbow he created in Valencia, Spain in 2005. He created the black rainbow as an eulogy for the victims of explosive attacks across the world.


NY Times article on him

Watch him work his magic with gunpowder in this video