Cai Guo-Qiang, alongside Ai Weiwei, is one of China’s most important contemporary artists. He rose to international prominence in the 1990s. Cai belongs to a generation of non-Western artists, such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Ricardo Brey, who combine Western and non-Western influences to build bridges between different cultures.
Cai was born in Quanzhou as the son of a traditional painter and calligrapher, who also ran a bookshop. He therefore had access to Western literature and traditional Chinese art forms from a young age. The artist was raised during the zenith of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong forcibly imposed communist principles. Cai experienced the dramatic social effects of this revolution at first hand. He grew up in a context “where explosions were the order of the day, whether cannon shots or celebratory fireworks.” This encounter with the destructive and positive nature of fireworks helped lay the foundation for Cai’s artistic practice, in which they play a central role, together with gunpowder.
In his twenties, Cai began to take a keen interest in the Western technique of oil painting. As the regime only offered training in traditional Chinese art, with social realist content, Cai opted to study theatrical design in 1981. He graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1985. The course taught him to develop theatrical imagery and spatial settings, and to understand concepts such as interactivity and teamwork. During this time, Cai travelled widely to remote regions of China, where he gained knowledge of his country’s distant past and history, an aspect ignored by Mao in the service of his ‘new’ ideology. In his own words, this gave Cai’s work “a deep spirituality and wild, raw formality”. He began experimenting with fireworks, which he ignited on mostly abstract oil paintings.
In 1986, Cai fled the Chinese regime and moved to Japan, “like many young Chinese pursuing a more modern life”. He stayed in the country until 1995. Due to the strictures of the Japanese art world, Cai received little recognition for his firework paintings until a leading Japanese art critic noticed him in 1989. Under great media scrutiny, he achieved his breakthrough. Kawagutchi Tatsuo, one of Japan’s best-known experimental artists, hired him on the spot. Since then, Cai’s practice has been highly diverse and eclectic. Generally, it follows the main principles of Chinese philosophy: ‘tian-di-ren’ (‘heaven-earth-humanity’). His oeuvre from the early 1990s onwards can be structured around this principle.
One series that includes Cai’s reflection on the sky is the ongoing ‘Projects for Extraterrestrials’, large firework installations in landscapes through which he aims to connect the earth with the cosmos. He also creates work about the planet and its riches. The landscape is always important, as a carrier of history, spirituality and culture, but also as a physical place, as the ‘canvas’ on which he works. As a result, Cai’s projects are often linked to Land Art, which emerged in America in the 1960s, as represented by artists such as Richard Long, Robert Morris and Walter De Maria. A third theme in Cai’s oeuvre is humanity. The essential principal is that people must live in harmony with the earth and the cosmos. Here, he uses materials and concepts linked to humans, drawn from field such as agriculture, war, transport and communication, to artefacts like computers, billboards and neon lights. Cai invariably combines this eclectic multiplicity with open, Eastern-spiritual and traditional Western philosophies, focusing on the link between the two. Within his oeuvre, his broad cultural-anthropological outlook is reflected in a positive global and social vision.
