Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. Trained in stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985 and now accomplished in a range of media, Cai's work is scholarly and often politically charged. Cai initially began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity and confront the suppressive, controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Cai explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, an inquiry that eventually led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and the development of his signature explosion events. The explosion projects, exemplified in his series Projects for Extraterrestrials, are both wildly poetic and ambitious at their core, and aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. During his tenure in Japan, Cai quickly achieved international prominence; his work is now widely presented around the world. Cai Guo-Qiang's practice draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions and materials such as fengshui, Chinese medicine, dragons, roller coasters, computers, vending machines and gunpowder. He was selected as a finalist for the1996 Hugo Boss Prize and won such prestigious awards