The Spring Festival in China is a lot like Independence Day in the U.S. That is, it’s a time for watching things blow up.Custom dictates that fireworks and firecrackers be lit at night during the festival, which celebrate’s Chinese New Year, to frighten away spirits and help pray for happiness. They also function as a way of intimidating the neighbors. Chinatowns will celebrate, but nowhere on par with Beijing. There, the evenings of Spring Festival are impromptu competitions among residents who can hardly contain their explosive enthusiasm for the new year. The whole experience can make neighborhoods look and sound like war zones.Cai Guo-Qiang has a more therapeutic view of fireworks. One of China’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Cai sees the firework as both brush and canvas, stealing it away from its merely frivolous connotations and bringing it closer to its original meaning in Chinese: “fire medicine.”In 2009, Motherboard visited Cai in his New York studio to see how one of China's hottest artists is reinventing one of its oldest technologies.Known for spectacular drawing, sculptural and performance pieces that often involve gunpowder (and sometimes taxidermy, automobiles and Chinese medicine), Cai rocketed to fame in 2008 with his engineering of the spectacular fireworks display that opened the Beijing Olympics (whew!) and a massive retrospective at the Guggenheim, the first of its kind for a Chinese artist.The exhibit, I Want to Believe, typifies Cai’s wide-ranging artistic profile: lining the inside of the rotunda with video and imagery and sculpture, the exhibit revolved around Inopportune: Stage One, a sculpture built of cars covered in neon sparks and tumbling down through the center of the museum's rotunda, like a series of freeze frames from a Quentin Tarantino film produced by Michael Bay.
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