Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, a town known for firecracker manufacturing. The son of an academic, Cai was trained in Shanghai in stage design after China's Cultural Revolution and his work has, since the outset, been scholarly and often politically charged. A master of many mediums, Cai began working with gunpowder in an effort to foster spontaneity in his painting, which he felt was overly "branded" by the controlled traditional technique of his training and the then contemporary social climate. While living in Japan (1986-1996), Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry which eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature land art, exemplified in his series Projects for Extraterrestrials. Cai quickly achieved international prominence during his tenure in Japan and began to show widely around the world. He became the first contemporary Chinese artist to have a solo show mounted by a Chinese government museum (Shanghai Museum of Art, 2002). Now a New York resident, Cai continues to draw on symbols of his native Chinese culture such as feng shui, eastern medicine, and dragons, among others, while referencing contemporary and popular culture with materials such as computers, vending machines, and fireworks. Such vernacular, he believes, can be universally understood, and employed to engage the viewer on a variety of levels, both conscious and unconscious. The desired outcome of Cai's famous explosion projects is both wildly poetic and ambitious at its core: to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. On September 15, Cai Guo-Qiang will use the sky over Central Park as a canvas for Light Cycle, and etch the magnificent event in our memory in honor of the Park in its 150th year. Born on December 8, 1957, Cai Guo-Qiang is regarded as one of the most significant Chinese artists to have emerged internationally in the last ten years. His work has ranked him as a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss Prize and merited such prestigious awards as The 48th Venice Biennial International Golden Lion Prize. Among many of the artist's solo exhibitions and projects are the notable An Arbitrary History, Musee d'art Contemporain Lyon, Lyon, France; Ye Gong Hao Long: Explosion Project for Tate Modern, Tate Modern, London; Transient Rainbow, 2002, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century, 1997, Queens Museum of Art, New York; Flying Dragon in the Heavens, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, 1993, Jiayuguan City, China. Cai participated in the pivotal group exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, 1998 at the Asia Society, New York, and 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cai is currently featured in the group exhibitions Pulse, Art, Healing, and Transformation at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston as well as the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center's Somewhere Better Than Here.