Widely acclaimed for his large-scale outdoor explosion events and site-specific installations, Cai conceives of his practice as an act of transgression, destabilising boundaries that extend from geopolitical borders to the horizons between earth and sky. Through gunpowder, the interstices between the terrestrial and the cosmic, the intimate and the global are rendered permeable.

Cai’s engagement with gunpowder began in the early 1980s in his hometown of Quanzhou, a city in China’s Fujian province, where the prevalence of firecracker workshops ensured its ready availability. His earliest experiments were improvised and exploratory: canvases hung on the wall became targets for small detonations fired from toy rockets across the yard. These initial forays soon evolved into more deliberate actions, as he dismantled firecrackers to work directly with their powder, later obtaining raw gunpowder from the local factories to ignite on canvas in increasingly ambitious trials.

Several decades separate Cai’s early improvisations from the works presented at White Cube Bermondsey, and in that time his methods for harnessing gunpowder have reached a unique refinement: each composition is first mapped by sprinkling the powder, then covered and weighted before ignition, so that the blast disperses, recomposes and fuses matter into image. His supports, too, have expanded beyond canvas and paper to encompass silk, porcelain, glass and mirror.

The works on view attest to yet another evolution in his practice: the advent of colour. In these recent compositions, the introduction of colour activates the sensuous and destabilising possibilities of a medium that has become the artist’s signature. The incorporation of coloured pyrotechnic powders confers a terrestrial immediacy, drawing forth evocations of this world, yet equally elevating them towards a sensual register. Amber collides with ash-grey in fevered bursts; diffusions of cerulean are flecked with inky lapis; whirlpools of fuchsia and blue converge and dissolve. Within these works, floral elements and bird motifs surface, lending some an organic rhythm that affirms cycles of continuity. For Cai, the natural world has long been a touchstone: ‘Flowers and plants have often served as my way of portraying that cosmic cycle – nature’s rhythm mirroring the birth and death of the stars’, he reflects. ‘I see my “cosmic gardens” as fields within the unseen world’.¹

The artist first experimented with coloured powder while living in Japan in the 1980s, but soon relinquished it, finding its effects a distraction from the questions then central to his practice. Natural black gunpowder, in its austere, monochromatic state, better served his desire to probe metaphysical dimensions: the principles of traditional Chinese cosmology in dialogue with his emerging fascination with modern astrophysics, then newly accessible to him in Japan. For the next three decades, Cai worked exclusively in monochrome, using the material to give form to what he described as his ‘unruly, wandering thoughts’.²

In 2015, however, during a return to Japan, he reintroduced colour into his practice. This pursuit not only opened a painterly dimension in his work but also one in which colour operates as a kind of hallucinatory agent, evoking states of perception beyond the visible. Poppies – whose seeds yield opium – bloom in intoxicating hues in works such as Poppy Series: Hallucination No.3 (2016) and Pink Poppy No. 2 (2021), intimating altered states of consciousness. In Red Birds (2022), avian flocks erupt and appear to be reborn in the process of their combustion. References to flora and nature have long remained central in Cai’s work as vehicles for expressing the cosmos, yet in colour they also signal a broadening of his visual vocabulary, extending metaphysical enquiry into registers of the corporeal and sensual.

Alongside these phenomenological concerns runs another axis of Cai’s recent practice: his correspondence with the Western art canon and European antiquity. From his youth, he has admired El Greco and Cézanne in particular, discerning in their works a shared impulse to render invisible worlds through visible form. El Greco’s heightened expressivity and Cézanne’s persistent return to motifs from his native Aix-en-Provence – above all his many iterations of Mont Sainte-Victoire – have both offered models of artistic vision with which Cai feels a deep affinity, where even the most ordinary motif becomes a meditation on time, space and the cosmos. His own Mountain (2019) situates itself within this lineage: conceived in response to Cézanne yet reframed within a broader horizon that unsettles the paradigm of Eastern and Western art histories, advancing instead a vision of heritage as shared experience.

As part of his ongoing project ‘An Individual’s Journey Through Western Art History’ – a series of exhibitions the artist began in 2017 – this dialogue has extended to the Renaissance and to sites of antiquity. The six works in his ‘Pompeiian Liaison’ series, for instance, emerged from an explosive intervention staged in Pompeii in 2019, in which canvases and objects were ignited, transformed in the process, and later excavated, as though archaeological remains. His ‘Study for Uffizi’ series (2018), meanwhile, renders the silverpoint techniques of Renaissance art – where delicate lines were wrought with a metal stylus – into the scorched impressions of gunpowder.

That Cai’s art draws on the past while orientating itself towards futurity is no contradiction: it is in this combustive act that new horizons are discerned. First discovered over a millennium ago by Chinese alchemists seeking an elixir of immortality, gunpowder has from its inception contained opposing currents – devised for the prolongation of life, yet realised in moments of impermanence. Cai’s practice reactivates this inheritance, mobilising volatility into a field where inherited binaries are unsettled, and where continuities – and futures – may be reimagined.

Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) has lived and worked in New York since 1995. In the early 1980s he trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, China, and from December 1986 to September 1995, he sojourned in Japan for nearly nine years, during the initial phase of which he studied at Tsukuba University in the Plastic Art and Mixed Media research lab. As of July 2025, he has realised over 650 exhibitions and projects over five continents, including more than 120 solo exhibitions and 70 firework explosion events. Notable international solo exhibitions include the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Italy (2019); Uffizi Galleries, Florence, Italy (2018); Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2017); Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2006). He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 2009 Fukuoka Prize. In 2012, he was honoured as a Laureate for the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, in the painting category. The same year, he was named as one of five artists to receive the first US Department of State Medal of Arts for his outstanding commitment to international cultural exchange.