Guo-Qiang Cai Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1957 -

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. Cai accomplished himself across a variety of media, he initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppression that he felt from the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China at the time. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale, and the development of his signature explosion events, exemplified in his series, Projects for Extraterrestrials. These explosion projects, both wildly poetic and ambitious at their core, aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. Cai is currently a core member of the creative team and Art Director of Visual and Special Effects of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. He is also preparing for his large-scale retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with subsequent international venues.

Among many of the artist's solo exhibitions and projects are the notable
Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006; curating the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005; Tornado: Explosion Project for the Festival of China, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., 2005; Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune, Mass MoCA, North Adams, 2005; Cai Guo-Qiang: Traveler, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2004; Organizing and curating BMoCA: Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen, Taiwan, 2004; Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park, New York, 2003; Ye Gong Hao Long: Explosion Project for Tate Modern, Tate Modern, London, 2003, Transient Rainbow, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Cai Guo-Qiang, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2002; APEC Cityscape Fireworks Show, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Shanghai, 2001; Cai Guo-Qiang: An Arbitrary History, Musee d'art Contemporain Lyon, France, 2001; Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York, 1997; Flying Dragon in the Heavens, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark, 1997; The Earth Has Its Black Hole Too, Hiroshima, Japan, 1994; and Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, Jiayuguan City, China, 1993.