Cai Guo-Qiang

What shocked me the most was the canvas on top, which now looked like an apparition of that heavenly garden.

At the end of 1986, I moved to Japan.

My cosmology, which till then was a simple one, developed by stargazing and studying feng shui in Quanzhou, suddenly expanded to include the latest developments in modern astrophysics.

As a young artist from China, my growing experiences with getting visas around the world inspired me to explore a chain of big footprints that traverse the earth.

The footprints would evoke extraterrestrials racing across several kilometers, bam, bam, bam, in only a few strides, ignoring artificial borders and disappearing into the distance.

After decades of attempts around the world, this concept was finally realized.

As 29 footprints fireworks at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the big footprints walked across the 15-kilometer central axis of Beijing like an invisible giant in the sky.

witnessed by 1.5 billion people in person and through live broadcasts.

This work symbolized the era's idealistic delusion of globalization.

In the early 90s, I conceived a work titled Sky Letter, a letter made of fireworks that would connect heaven and earth.

I made many failed attempts to realize the idea over 21 years.

the difficulty of the project, laying its technical requirements.

We needed a helium balloon of over 6,000 cubic meters in order to raise a ladder as high as a World Trade Center.

Once up, the balloon could easily be blown away.

And because it would carry lots of dangerous materials,

we had to acquire numerous permits for land, sea, and air in my hometown.

It's said that 500 meters is the height of the clouds, so the letter symbolized a useful dream of reaching for the stars and touching the clouds.

I've created so much art around the world, but my grandma has never seen any of them in person.

so I was determined to do something awesome for her to see.

One morning in 2015, at the crack of dawn, a golden ladder rose into the sky.