Featuring stunning, never-before-published works, this is the most intimate book to date on the renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this volume documents new projects commissioned for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, alongside Cai Guo-Qiang's own survey of his artistic journey and the personal cosmology that informs his work. CONTRIBUTORS: Jeffrey Deitch Jeffrey Deitch is the Director of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Rebecca Morse Rebecca Morse is Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Philipp Kaiser Philipp Kaiser has been a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art is Los Angeles since 2007. From 2001 through 2007 he was Curator at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. He has written numerous contributions on contemporary art and has curated solo-exhibitions with Louise Lawler, Johanna Billing, Christian Philipp Müller, Simon Starling, Amelie von Wulffen, Sterling Ruby amongst others but also large-scale thematic exhibitions like »Flashback - Revisiting the Art of the 80s« and »Index - California Conceptualism«. He is currently working on the first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Philipp Kaiser will assume the post of Director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in late 2012. About Shen Kuiyi Kuiyi Shen is Director of the Chinese Studies program and Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Lesley Ma Lesley Ma, former Manager of Cai Studio, is earning her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. It features a rich sampling of Cai's wonderfully diverse oeuvre, including explosion events, gunpowder drawings, and installations. Informative essays and a conversation with the artist explore Cai's influences, from traditional Chinese scrolls and his father's miniature paintings to Asian philosophy and memories of his grandmother. Including never-before-published new works and unprecedented contributions by the artist himself, this book promises to be an important reference on Cai's art for years to come. ILLUSTRATION: 175 colour illustrations

This publication celebrates an artist at the height of his international career. The highly anticipated exhibition 'Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth' will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, tracing QAGOMA's unique history with this globally renowned artist, from his early-career works from 'The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' in 1996 and 1999 through to the presentation in 2013 of his major new works. Essays by Australian and international authors will explore the exhibition's interrelated themes of nature, spirituality and globalisation, and focus on Cai's new works, documented here for the first time. With writing also by Cai Guo-Qiang on his collaborations with children from around the world.

First catalog to cover the range of materials used by Cai Guo-Qiang, from gunpowder and paint on canvas, porcelain and silk Covers the artist's entire career to date Accompanies an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum concluding on 19 April 2020 Cai Guo-Qiang is famous for his work with gunpowder explosions and fireworks, with which he has created spectacular displays in almost 30 countries, in the skies across Asia, Europe and America. This catalog not only shows the artist's skills and innovation in using silk, porcelain and other materials together with gunpowder, but also how he adapts them to explore his own central concerns of creation, destruction, chance and the cosmos. Through gunpowder Cai has engaged with the environment in large-scale projects and with history in site-specific ones. These and other imaginative handlings of gunpowder sit within his work alongside the material's best-known manifestation - fireworks. He has depicted figurative images and human emotions with firework displays set against day and night skies, launched from buildings and rivers, and has also produced painterly designs on paper, canvas, silk, porcelain and, more recently, stone and glass. Cai is perhaps most widely recognized for the fireworks that played such a defining part in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games.

Text by Carlos Basualdo, David Elliott, Marion Boulton Stroud, Wang Mingxian.