Cai Guo-Qiang

More than 1,000 years ago, when Chinese alchemists were developing elixir of immortality, one recipe caused an explosion.

They named their discovery fire medicine.

the Chinese word for gunpowder.

From the very beginning, gunpowder has been about accidents, loss of control, and destruction.

But it's also been about the healing power and unseeing energies.

I dreamed of becoming an artist when I was little, but like my father, who was an avid painter himself, I was cautious and timid.

Caution is a fine quality in life, but not so in art.

And Chinese society was also very controlling when I was young, so I longed for an artistic medium that could help me free myself and lose control.

I came from an Asian city in Southeast China called Quanzhou.

The city had many firecracker factories when I was young, so it was easy to get ganghao there.

When I first began using gunpowder to create art, I would lay out a canvas in the living room and set off small explosions on it.

Seeing the canvas on fire one day, my grandmother threw a linear rack over the flame and put it out with a small puff.

It was my grandma who taught me that while it's important to light fires, it's more important to know how to put them out.

Over the decades, I've run closer to Gunpowder and mastered more techniques.

My creations forever oscillate between destruction and construction, control and freedom, dictatorship and democracy.

For example, I first painted my imagination of paradise, a mirage of temptations.

I exploded color gunpowder to create a sensual and dazzling garden, so beautiful that I didn't want to lay a finger on it.

However, I picked up my courage and scattered black gunpowder all over this beauty, covered it with a blank canvas, and ignited it again.

Done.

When I removed the canvas on top, the once enchanting garden was now forever sealed beneath the black.