Currently based in New York City, Cai Guoqiang’s works draw from his adolescent experiences protesting in the Cultural Revolution, where explosions – from both cannons and fireworks – were commonly seen. As one of China’s four great inventions, gunpowder and the merciless violence associated with it have been transformed by Cai into multicolored explosions using vegetable dyes, mimicking the way watercolor ink blurs into the rice paper of traditional Chinese watercolor paintings (水墨画).

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