b. 1957, Quanzhou, China

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, China. He received a BFA in stage design from the Shanghai Drama Institute in 1985, soon after which he immigrated to Japan, where his work first achieved art-critical recognition. Beginning in 1984, Cai extended his earlier experimentation with fuses and gunpowder to site-specific explosion events and his now-signature gunpowder drawings, which he made by igniting explosives laid on paper. In his multifaceted engagement with gunpowder, the artist mines the material's charged associations and has used it to create radical new forms and methodologies of art. A series of gunpowder drawings comprises one element of Cai's Projects for Extraterrestrials (c.1989–present), an ongoing project the artist developed to suspend, provoke, and challenge viewers' assumptions, including the East-West dichotomy that dominates the theoretical terms used to analyze his early work. Another component of this series, and Cai's largest explosion to date, is Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials (1993), for which the artist enlisted hundreds of volunteers to help him “extend” the Great Wall by detonating 10,000 meters of gunpowder fuse, which had been laid in a snaking line from the western end of the wall into the Gobi Desert.

Since 1995, when Cai arrived in New York, he has continued to experiment with gunpowder drawings as well as detonations ranging from mushroom clouds to fireworks. During that same time, he also began to create massive installations that did not include actual explosions but nevertheless alluded to violence and cultural friction. In his varied artistic practices and materials, Cai draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence. In Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan (1996), shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, a structure built from large branches affixed with sheepskin bags descends from the ceiling in the form of a dragon, culminating at the floor with three running Toyota engines. Cai also created several installations in which various objects have been impaled by a dense barrage of arrows: a suspended fishing boat frame in Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows (1998), tigers in Inopportune: Stage Two (2004), and a rug descending from the ceiling in Flying Carpet (2005). The seminal installation Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard (1999), a recreation of an iconic socialist-realist sculptural ensemble from 1965, elicited national controversy in China and received the Leone d'Oro at that year's Venice Biennale. In 2000 Cai developed his ongoing social project Everything is a Museum, for which he produces MoCAs (museums of contemporary art) in remote sites, appropriating various structures such as military bunkers and old kilns. Reflection—A Gift from Iwaki, a work first realized in 2004 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., appears as a wrecked hulk of a wooden schooner beached on a sand bar of porcelain statuettes of the popular Buddhist deity Guanyin. Inopportune: Stage One (2004), originally installed in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and reimagined for the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the artist's retrospective in 2008, presents nine real cars in a cinematic progression that simulates a car bomb.