Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He studied stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, graduating in 1985. Cai Guo-Qiang is most well-known for his use of gunpowder, which began with drawings and later developed into large-scale choreographed explosions. Cai Guo-Qiang has received numerous accolades, including being the first artist granted a solo exhibition at a sate-operated Chinese museum with his showing at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2002, and being the first Chinese artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim museum in New York in 2008. Cai Guo-Qiang has received numerous awards including the Golden Lion Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999—the first time the award was presented to an artist from China—and the Hiroshima Art Award in Japan in 2007. He also gained widespread recognition as the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Selected Public Collections: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Taiwan Museum of Art, Taichung, Taiwan Selected Solo Exhibitions / Events: “Cai Guo-Qiang’s Painting” Office of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Tokyo, 1987 “Works 1988/89” Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Osaka, Japan, 1990 “Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10” Gobi Desert, Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, 1993 “Concerning Flame” Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 1994 “Flying Dragon in the Heavens” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 1997 “Golden Missile” Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 1998 “I Am the Y2K Bug” Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, 1999 “Cai Guo-Qiang” Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France, 2000 “Cai Guo-Qiang” Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2002 “On Black Fireworks” Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain, 2005 “Head On” Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany, 2006 “I Want to Believe” Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, 2008 “I Want to Believe” National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 2008 “Cai Guo-Qiang: Hanging Out in the Museum” Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2009 “Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab” Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, 2011 “Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, 2012