mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

The artist

The contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou. A teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he received an education in the arts in his native land. In 1986, he left to live in Japan. There he experimented with the use of gunpowder, first to make plastic art and later for large-scale explosions. Ten years later, Cai Guo-Qiang moved to New York, where he produced a varied, eclectic body of work. A renowned contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang enjoyed the ambiguous privilege of designing the firework spectacles for the 2008 Beijing Winter Olympic Games. The recipient of many international awards, his work was featured in a retrospective presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York in 2008, then at the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in March 2009.