PRESENTER:

Artist Cai Guo-qiang made the series of works depicted in these photographs. Fireworks and gunpowder feature often in his art, and we wanted to know why.

CAI GUO-QIANG:

There was a time I felt I was being controlled by Chinese society; and similar to my father, I was quite timid by nature. So, I was deliberately looking for a medium to fight against the control I felt and the timidity in my personality. I chose to use gunpowder as it provides me with a lot of freedom, and at the same time I’m able to dictate what to do with it, to control and manipulate it.

If we had to choose a significant visual symbol for twentieth century, that would be the mushroom cloud: there’s the nuclear project, also known as the ‘Manhattan Project’.

PRESENTER:

Cai Quo-qiang made this piece in the 1990s, an important time in his development as an artist. Hearing how he went about it was fascinating.

CAI GUO-QIANG:

This is the first piece of work I did after I came to the U.S. It connects American society, its politics and art together. It embodies my attitude as an artist. The pieces were created in various locations in the U.S. between February and April 1996. Each explosion lasted around three to six seconds.

With approval from the FBI and the Bureau of Energy Resources, I became the first Chinese citizen allowed to enter the Nevada Nuclear Site. My assistant and I bought the Chinese firecrackers and the materials needed for the explosion from Chinatown and made a small hand-held bomb in the hotel we stayed at in Las Vegas. During our visit to the Nevada Nuclear Site, we quickly launched the hand-made ‘bomb’ on-site when nobody was looking, and there was a little mushroom cloud in my hand for a few short seconds.

We were very quickly subdued! They even notified Washington about this incident! Instructed by the central authority, the team responsible for nuclear research came in to check and investigate the ‘bomb’ we’d made with the Chinese firecracker—it must have looked like a joke to those nuclear specialists! They also insisted on monitoring the health of all officers who were present at the time. A few months later, the report came back with no problems, but a nice little surprise—our technical director’s wife had become pregnant!

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