Cai Guo-Qiang

Dicecream MagazineNovember 11, 2017

Cai Guo-Qiang

Dicecream Magazine

🗿Cai Guo-Qiang (born 8 December 1957) is a Chinese artist who currently lives and works in New York City and New Jersey.

Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, shanshui paintings, science, flora and fauna, portraiture, and fireworks.

Much of his work draws on Maoist/Socialist concepts for content, especially his gunpowder drawings which strongly reflect Mao Zedong's tenet "destroy nothing, create nothing."

Cai has said: “In some sense, Mao Zedong influenced all artists from our generation with his utopian romance and sentiment."

Cai’s importance when considered on the parallel history of Chinese contemporary art is "critical," as he was among the first artists to contribute to discussions of Chinese art, however geographically dispersed, as a viable intellectual narrative with its own historical context and theoretical framework.

He was selected as a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize and won the 48th Venice Biennale International Golden Lion Prize and 2001 CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts.

In 2008, he was subject to a large-scale mid-career retrospective, I Want To Believe, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which eventually traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

He also gained widespread attention as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2012, October 23, he will be awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo as the first Chinese national Laureate.