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About Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, Fujian in December 1957. In the early 1980s, he was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. From December 1986 to September 1995, he sojourned in Japan for some nine years. From 1989 to 1991, he was a student at Tsukuba University, furthering his education in the Plastic Art and Mixed Media research lab. In Japan, he worked and resided in Tokyo, Toride, and Iwaki, among other locations.

Over the years, Cai has commanded a broad range of creative mediums, from painting, installation, video art, and performance art, to works realized with new technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), NFTs, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Grounded in the conceptual foundations of Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues, his often site-specific artworks adapt to local conditions, interpreting and responding to the local culture and history as well as establishing a dialogue between viewers and the larger universe around them. His famed gunpowder paintings, explosion events, and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to oscillate freely between society and nature.

As of April 2023, Cai has realized 561 exhibitions and projects on five continents, while there are twelve ongoing and 111 unrealized projects in his arsenal—some of which are envisioned for outer space and the universe.

The major awards he has received include the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the Fukuoka Prize in 2009. In 2012, he was honored as a Laureate for the Praemium Imperiale in painting. That same year, he was awarded the first U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. Cai also served as the Director of Visual Effects and Fireworks for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

For over three decades, Cai has held numerous solo exhibitions in major art museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006 and his retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. In recent years, Cai’s important exhibitions in Japan include his solo exhibition There and Back Again at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2015. In the same year, Cai realized the explosion event Sky Ladder in his hometown of Quanzhou. The artwork became the centerpiece of an eponymous documentary directed by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald and globally distributed on Netflix.

In recent years, he embarked on his Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History—a series of exhibitions held in world-renowned museums, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2017); Museo del Prado, Madrid (2017); Uffizi Galleries, Florence (2018); National Archaeological Museum of Naples and Pompeii Archaeological Park (2019). From December 2020 to February 2021, Cai held his exhibition Odyssey and Homecoming at the Palace Museum in Beijing, marking the first solo exhibition of contemporary art in the museum’s history. In July 2021, Odyssey and Homecoming traveled to the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai as one of its inaugural exhibitions. His most recent projects include the blockchain divination project EET as well as the artificial intelligence art project cAITM, both launched in 2023.

Cai has lived and worked in New York since 1995.