Chance Encounters, Edition 47
Cai Guo-Qiang: Painting with Gunpowder
In conjunction with the regionwide PST: Art and Science Collide exhibition series, the University of Southern California Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California is hosting an extensive career retrospective of the international artist Cai Guo-Quiang (Chinese, b. 1957) titled "Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey.” Cai is best known for his use of gunpowder as an artistic medium to create drawings, paintings, installations, and spectacular site-specific firework events. The exhibition features Cai’s lifelong engagement with gunpowder, presenting decades of artwork, as well as informative displays that explore the science of gunpowder along with studies conducted by the Getty Conservation Institute regarding the nature, properties, and best methods of preservation of this unique artistic material.
Cai Guo-Quiang was born in China, emigrated to Japan, and settled in New York City, but is a truly international art star who is among the most in-demand artists in the 21st century. Cai’s early career as a painter and set designer in China was unremarkable except for the resourcefulness demonstrated by his use of unusual materials to overcome limitations set by cost and access to quality paint. He experimented with mixing in materials such as ash, charcoal, or sawdust to extend the pigment and add texture to his work. The artist sought to overcome the cautious restraint of his timid personality and the oppressive confines of the Cultural Revolution in China during his childhood. He attempted to introduce chaos and chance into his artwork, first by diluting paint into thin washes blown around with a hand-held hairdryer, then by letting pigeons walk through paint and onto the painting, and finally by exploding firecrackers and shooting toy rockets at the canvas. Finding the impact of these early experiments too limited he began to open firecrackers to access the explosive powder directly, sprinkling it on the canvas and igniting it with an incense stick or lit cigarette. Pleased with the result, Cai started to obtain inexpensive gunpowder directly from firework factories in his hometown.
“Being cautious is not necessarily a bad thing, but as an artist my father tended to be constrained in his ideas. Although his work might appear splendid and grand they lacked the spirit of breaking away from convention. So, I felt I needed to counter my cautious logic and my need for control and then I discovered gunpowder” – Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai found gunpowder to be liberating, in part because it was a novel way to introduce chance to his work, but also because the physical danger challenged him to overcome his cautious and timid nature. Regarding this early period of discovery, Cai said “The destructive nature of gunpowder not only tested my determination and courage but freed me from the social constraints of the time.” Additionally, the artist was attracted to the transformative potential of using a product historically associated with violence and destruction to create something beautiful.
After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai gained access to higher quality black gunpowder as well as better paint pigments; however, at this stage of his career he viewed color as a potential distraction from his exploration and technical mastery of black powder to create the desired effects on canvas. In 2017, in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute, Cai reproduced his early experiments to produce a series of small canvases to demonstrate the variety of hues, depth of black, behavior, and effects that could be achieved using only black gunpowder depending on application and substrate.A separate series of experiments was made with colored pigment mixed with gunpowder for contrast. The yellow seen in the black gunpowder paintings is produced by realgar, an arsenic sulfide mineral compound used in some gunpowder formulations.
As his work matured and the artist gained mastery over the unpredictable material, his boundless artistic ambition was revealed. In addition to gunpowder drawings and paintings, Cai developed a series of large-scale site-specific explosion events titled “Project for Extraterrestrials” wherein he sought to express the human experience for an imagined alien audience viewing the Earth from outer space. The formal appearance and contextual meaning of his work differs substantially from the more familiar pyrotechnic firework displays on New Year’s Eve and 4th of July celebrations. Many of the unrealized projects exist only in preparatory drawings and small-scale experiments.
The artist has also created spectacular events with humans as the intended audience, such as the giant footprints walking across the night sky during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and Sky Ladder (2015), a decades long project created specifically for his grandmother’s benefit and featured in a documentary film, Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, 2017, directed by Kevin McDonald.
Cai’s daytime firework events substitute the light created by traditional nighttime fireworks for an explosive distribution of non-toxic, organic pigments to paint the sky with color and form. He has created daytime firework events around the world giving viewers spectacular and memorable visual experience unlike any other firework or art form. Here is a video presentation of his 2018 daytime firework exhibition inspired by the Italian Renaissance.
The artist has even imagined an impossible firework event on the surface of the moon that would be visible to the entire world. The impracticality of the project did not stop Cai from exploring the idea in notebooks and large-scale drawings of what such an artwork would look like if it could be achieved.
Because these explosion spectacles are transient, the current retrospective exhibition offers video recordings of the most prominent examples as well as displays of his notebooks and ephemera produced during the events. When Cai wants to create longer lived artwork specifically for galleries and museums he returns to gunpowder paintings. His artistic process is most analogous to Jackson Pollock’s Action Paintings in that both artists work on the floor, both have technical mastery and precision in their application of materials yet also always have some element of chance or accident, and finally, the resultant painting can be thought of as the visible record of the artists’ physical act or performance.
To create his paintings, Cai places large canvases on the floor and distributes pigmented and black gunpowder across the surface using his expertise and knowledge of the properties, reactivity, and color to achieve the desired effect. He often uses stencils to block and control the final result. In other instances, he covers the drawing in glass to trap the smoke and create a flowing drapery effect. Cai then places a second canvas on top and adds a final layer of cardboard with weights on top to contain the explosion. In addition to protecting the artist and his assistants, the weighted cardboard acts to limit the amount of oxygen the gunpowder can utilize during ignition, which causes the gunpowder to scorch but not burn the paper or canvas. The result is controlled but also unpredictable; this aspect appeals to the artist’s desire to introduce the invisible element of chance or mystery and therefore render “the unseen” visible in the final work.
“It is easy to depict things of this physical world, but it is very difficult to depict things that are not seen yet has a profound effect on us. This is something I am continuously exploring and trying to form…not everything needs to be resolved, sometimes you can allow uncertainty to exist.” – Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang’s art is ultimately about embracing paradoxes: controlling the uncontrollable, creating beauty from a substance used for violence and destruction, and invoking danger to purge his timid and cautious nature. This article addresses only a small part of the artist’s boundless imagination, his ambition, and tremendous scale and drama of his work. Because still images and written descriptions do not adequately capture or convey the visceral impact of Cai Guo-Qiang’s artwork I encourage readers to visit the exhibition in person or to find videos of his monumental explosion and daytime firework events. For more information, here are links to several videos demonstrating his process and explosion events.
Art from Fiery Immolation | Civilizations | NJ PBS (3:43 min) PBS Documentary Series
Cai Guo-Qiang Creates New Gunpowder Paintings (3:02 min) Guggenheim Museum
Cai Guo-Qiang in "Power" - Season 3 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21 (14:13 min) Art21
The retrospective exhibition at USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena continues through June 15, 2025. Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey - Pacific Asia Museum
Excellent article! Thank you for the well written synopsis.