Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, his work has since crossed multiple mediums within art, including drawing, video and performance art. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his signature explosion events, exemplified in the series Projects for Extraterrestrials. Wildly poetic and ambitious at their core, these events aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. His large-scale installations, which have drawn upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, utilize a site-specific approach to culture and history. Cai quickly achieved international prominence during his residence in Japan. Since 1995, he has lived in New York.

Cai was awarded the Japan Cultural Design Prize in 1995 and the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2001 he received the Alpert Award in Visual Art. His solo exhibition at Mass MoCA won Best Monographic Museum Show, and Inopportune: Stage One won Best Installation or Single Work in a Museum from the International Association of Art Critics, New England in 2005. Two years later, he was awarded the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize. Cai also held the distinguished position as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and the Director of firework festivities for China’s 60th National Day in 2009.  That same year, he received the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize.

Cai was the subject of a large-scale retrospective titled Hanging Out in the Museum, which opened in November 2009 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In February 2008, his retrospective I Want to Believe opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York before traveling to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in August 2008 and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao in March 2009.  Among his many other solo exhibitions and projects include Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms held jointly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2009; Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006; Inopportune, Mass MoCA, North Adams, 2005; Transient Rainbow, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002; Cai Guo-Qiang, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2002; APEC Cityscape Fireworks Show, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, Shanghai, 2001; An Arbitrary History, Musee d'art Contemporain Lyon, Lyon, France, 2001.  He curated the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, and organized and curated BMoCA: Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen, Taiwan, 2004. Along with DMoCA and UMoCA, BMoCA is one of three alternative art museums founded and curated by Cai in the series Everything Is Museum.

Most recently, Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis, opened in May 2010 as the inaugural exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.  Another solo exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Travels in the Mediterranean is currently on view at Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice, France.

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