Cai Guo-Qiang is the most internationally acclaimed of all contemporary Chinese artists. He was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province in China in 1958. His father, Cai Ruiqin was a traditional brush painter and calligrapher. However, rather than follow in his father's footsteps, Cai studied stage design at the prestigious Shanghai Drama Institute. He soon emerged as a player in the experimental art world of the 1980s. 1n 1986, he received a student visa for Japan, where he spent the next nine years of his life. His experiences, there, were to have a major influence on the direction of his artwork. In 1995, after a yearlong residency at the P.S. 1 Art Centre in Queens, he made New York his base.

Cai's art is complex and unique. His art is a result of his origins, his experiences, his beliefs and his sensitivities. In his work he challenges all the accepted boundaries of art making becoming famous for creating major works using explosives. Along with his Gunpowder Drawings, he is also renowned for his explosion events, which are often site-specific artistic creations. He records moments of many of these events later in gunpowder drawings. His installations call on many icons of Chinese culture such as ancient mythology and military history to ask new questions of the modern world. Cai is also very involved in social projects where he engages entire local communities to produce art often in remote, non-art sites.

As part of the new avant-garde movement his early works dealt with profound subjects and often contained political comments, concerns that have remained central to his art. His first opportunity to encounter a new world was in 1986 when he went to Japan. Coming from a tightly controlled society, he embraced its intellectual openness and discussion of the Western World. However, Japanese society is tightly woven and Cai was an outsider, an alien in his new land. He now explored the properties of gunpowder and started using it extensively in his art. Through its tremendous energy, destruction would ensue, from which something new and wonderful would be created. He first began his explosion projects here culminating in his series "Projects for Extraterrestrials". These were explosion events on a grand scale, which were an attempt to engage viewers with the larger universe around them.