When Cai Guo-qiang (蔡國強) left his native China in 1986, he began a process of artistic development that would lead to his being recognized as one of world's top artists.

Two years ago, he became the first living Chinese artist to be awarded a full retrospective at New York's prestigious Guggenheim Museum, which later traveled to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the two shows logging the considerable total of about 900,000 visitors between them.

Western critics have long lauded the 53-year-old artist for making art from traditional Chinese materials, especially gunpowder, which he's used to create fireworks displays with a conceptual edge. His famous exploding oeuvre includes everything from an awe-inspiring circle of light that spun for half a minute 300m over New York's Central Park in 2003, to tiny mushroom clouds at historical nuclear test sites throughout the western US in the mid-1990s and the celebratory footprint-shaped explosions that tracked across Beijing's sky to open the 2008 Olympic Games.

原文網址: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2010/01/17/2003463696