Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in the early 1980s. From December 1986 to September 1995, he sojourned in Japan. Cai has resided and worked in New York since 1995.
Cai has excelled in a broad range of creative mediums, from painting, installation, video art, and performance art, to new technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), NFTs, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI). Grounded in the conceptual foundations of Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues, his often site-specific artworks around the world interpret and respond to local culture and history, establishing a dialogue between viewers and the larger universe around them. His famed gunpowder paintings, explosion art, and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to oscillate freely between society and nature.
As of July 2025, Cai has realized over 652 exhibitions and projects on five continents, including approximately 122 solo exhibitions and 72 firework explosion events.
His major solo exhibitions include one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006, and a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008, the latter of which broke the museum’s then-attendance record of a visual art exhibition. In 2015, Cai realized the explosion event Sky Ladder in his hometown of Quanzhou. The eponymous documentary film, directed by Academy Award winner Kevin MacDonald, was released globally on Netflix.
In recent years, Cai 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). In December 2020, on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the Forbidden City, Cai presented Odyssey and Homecoming, becoming the first contemporary artist to have a solo exhibition at the Palace Museum in Beijing. The following year, Odyssey and Homecoming travelled to the new Jean Nouvel–designed Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, as one of the opening exhibitions.
His most recent major projects include the daytime fireworks When the Sky Blooms with Sakura in Iwaki and the solo exhibition Ramble in the Cosmos—From Primeval Fireball Onward at the National Art Center, Tokyo in 2023; the Getty-commissioned daytime fireworks WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, presented at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Getty-curated solo exhibition A Material Odyssey in 2024; and the interactive fireworks Interspecies Love Letter and solo exhibition cAI™ Lab commissioned by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 2025.
Cai has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 2009 Fukuoka Prize. In 2012, he was honored as a Laureate for the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in the painting category. The award recognizes lifetime achievement in the arts across categories not covered by the Nobel Prize. The same year, he was named as one of five artists to receive the first U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts for his outstanding commitment to international cultural exchange. His recent honors include the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award in 2015, the 7th Isamu Noguchi Award in 2020, the Rockefeller 3rd Award in 2022, and the 74th Art Encouragement Prize by Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology in 2024. Cai also served as the Director of Visual Effects and Fireworks for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
