The following profile of Cai Guoqiang, the creative director behind the opening ceremony's fireworks display first appeared as the art feature in the August issue of the Beijinger magazine. The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is currently hosting Cai’s retrospective, it will be on display until Sep 2.

Cai Guoqiang was the first Chinese contemporary artist invited for a solo exhibition at the Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; he broke every auction record for Chinese contemporary art by selling his 14 gun powder paintings collectively for more than HKD 70 million (about USD 9,000,000); he won the Golden Lion Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial … the list goes on and on. All these accolades are enviable badges. But what may prove to be his defining moment was the show he put together as director of visual and special effects for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, expected to be an explosive event – both symbolically for its importance to the Games and grandiosity in scale, and literally because of Cai's trademark component: gunpowder.

Almost every Cai-piece is a Big Bang that harbors a galaxy of motions. In the installation Head On (2006), he aligned 99 life-sized wolves into a suspended curve that steered them crashing into a giant glass pane. His Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials NO. 9 (1992) involved exploding gunpowder that had been set out in concentric circles within the grounds of a military base. His frequent use of gunpowder demonstrates the most radical dynamics: from a minute solid (powder) to the roar of a fleeting nirvana charging a viewer with painful, overbearing bliss. Even the choice in number reveals the all-pervasive restlessness of Cai's art: His obsession with the number nine, the most yang of all the numbers – the 99 wolves (Head On, 2006), the nine tigers of Inopportune: Stage 2 (2004), and the 99 boats of Cai's failed project in the Asia-Pacific Triennale – are deliberate acts in which Cai leaves space to avoid completeness, thus opening the grounds for generating more movement and always preserving the balance of imbalance in his works.

Implicitly, Cai's artistic practice is also about healing (yi in Chinese), usually shown by his use of Chinese medicine. His Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot (1995) is an installation of a fish boat from Quanzhou, the artist’s hometown, loaded with earthy jars, bamboo ladles, Chinese herbs and ginseng beverages, brought to the home of Marco Polo on the 700th anniversary of his return to the West from the Far East. Transient Rainbow (2002), is also a work that aims to soothe, though the contradiction lies in his use of gunpowder to do so: In response to the angst left upon New Yorkers following 9/11, Cai arranged a rainbow of fireworks that connected Queens and Manhattan in a beautiful, harmonizing arch. In The Beijing News, Cai explained that “the rainbow recalls a sense of hope, and I am transforming a dangerous substance into one that heals.” These pieces demonstrate that healing and violent motions are not necessarily contradictory, as to Chinese people medical theory states that movements – of qi and blood – can cure pain.

Cai's other great concern is space (very appropriate for one who studied stage art), shown in his work not as a void of homogenous emptiness separated from material but a site which heterogeneity is defined by relations between different components. In Inopportune: Stage One (2004), which the Guggenheim described as a series of “nine real cars in a cinematic progression that simulates a car bombing,” Cai defies dimensionality by coalescing different moments in time which relate to a singular act penetrated by simultaneity (as is often done in traditional Chinese scroll paintings). Furthermore, Cai's frequent use of boats – from his fishing boat sailing to Italy or the wooden 3000-arrow-pierced boat (Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998) – also functions to link different spaces: the confined space of a sailing vessel inhabits the space into which it sails, while at the same time not belonging to anywhere.

Links and Sources
Jandan.net: Images from I Want to Believe exhibition