Everyone knows that Chinese New Year — the 40-day festival that began in February — is a time for blowing stuff up. But if you’ve only been to a Chinatown celebration, you ain’t seen nothing. In Beijing, the start of Spring Festival looks and sounds like a bad day in Kabul. (Although, it should be noted, blowing up Rem Koolhaas buildings or destroying ancient gates is not typically part of the ritual.)Of course, there’s more to chunjie than fireworks, and there’s more to fireworks than just lights and explosions. Pushing the envelope (and lots of ignition buttons) is one of China’s leading artists, Cai Guo Qiang.With a hint of the political — and a sardonic embrace of Mao Zedong’s tenet “destroy nothing, create nothing” — Cai elevates pyrotechnics to another level. Known for spectacular drawing, sculptural and performance pieces that often involve gunpowder (and sometimes taxidermy, automobiles and Chinese medicine), Cai blew up in 2008 with his engineering of the Beijing Olympics fireworks display and a massive retrospective at the Guggenheim, the first of its kind for a Chinese artist. Titled, wonderfully, I Want to Believe, the show revolved quite literally around Inopportune: Stage One, a sculpture built of cars covered in neon sparks and tumbling through the center of the museum’s rotunda, like a series of freeze frames from a Quentin Tarantino film produced by Michael Bay.Recently Motherboard brought some cameras to visit Cai in his New York studio to see how one of China’s hottest artists is reinventing one of its oldest technologies.
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