It’s been a while I haven’t seen any Chinese art that makes eye wide-opened. As we all know, Chinese art is booming in the past couple years (and still). This fact has a big impact to Chinese local artists. Many artists start to massively produce their art like the factory line to meet the big requirement of the market. In the meanwhile, many artists start to make Chinese Chinese art to meet the market’s interests, which sometimes results to overemphasize on artists’ Chinese identity and historical issues. Different from this perspective, Cai Guo-Qiang’s art works distinctly present him as a self. There’s a nice blend of his Chinese roots and universal language (symbols and metaphors) in his art works that creates a channel for the universal dialogue. In stead of imposing his Chinese identity and social issues on his viewers, he steps back and constructs ideas in a big picture, and presents it in his poetic and unique own way. Like those gunpowder performance and paintings, he brings viewers to connect to the universe in a different perspective, both seen and unseen worlds. His installations are like timeless storytelling of the social issues that has been haunted in every Chinese mind. I admire the way that he’s be true to himself and seizes his childhood passion for gunpowder and expands it to a meaningful realm: his art pursue. The conflict and destruction that gunpowder creates, and the ephemeral nature of it also add poetic and melancholy aura to his works, which makes these art pieces profound and unforgettable.

To see is to believe, really. Be sure to spare some time for these gunpowder performance documentation videos!