TED Talks Daily
A firework ladder to the sky — and the magic of explosive art | Cai Guo-Qiang (re-release)
04 Jul 2025
From a boy setting off small explosions in his living room to the creator of world-famous pyrotechnic events, multidisciplinary artist Cai Guo-Qiang has always been drawn to gunpowder. He gives a stunning tour of his work — including his fireworks spectacle at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his "sky ladder" of fire reaching to the clouds and new work created with AI — and shows how his art probes the line between destruction and construction, control and freedom, violence and beauty. (This talk was delivered in Mandarin and translated live into English. The translation was put through a custom AI model of Cai Guo-Qiang's voice, powered by technology from Metaphysic. You'll hear how Cai would sound if he were speaking English.)This episode originally aired July 30, 2024.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. From a boy setting off small explosions in his living room to the creator of world-famous pyrotechnic events, multidisciplinary artist Cai Guo-chang has always been drawn to gunpowder.
In this Archive Talk, he gives a stunning tour of his work, including his firework spectacle at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his sky ladder of fire reaching to the clouds, and new work created with A.I., He shares why he believes art is one of the best mediums to explore the great tensions of our world, violence and beauty, control and freedom, destruction and construction.
Please note this talk was delivered in Mandarin Chinese and translated live into English. The translation was put through a custom AI model of Cai Guochang's voice, powered by technology from Metaphysic. In this episode, you'll hear how Cai would sound if he were speaking English.
More than 1,000 years ago, when Chinese alchemists were developing elixir of immortality, one recipe caused an explosion. They named their discovery fire medicine. the Chinese word for gunpowder. From the very beginning, gunpowder has been about accidents, loss of control, and destruction. But it's also been about the healing power and unseeing energies.
I dreamed of becoming an artist when I was little, but like my father, who was an avid painter himself, I was cautious and timid. Caution is a fine quality in life, but not so in art. And Chinese society was also very controlling when I was young, so I longed for an artistic medium that could help me free myself and lose control. I came from an Asian city in Southeast China called Quanzhou.
The city had many firecracker factories when I was young, so it was easy to get ganghao there. When I first began using gunpowder to create art, I would lay out a canvas in the living room and set off small explosions on it. Seeing the canvas on fire one day, my grandmother threw a linear rack over the flame and put it out with a small puff.
It was my grandma who taught me that while it's important to light fires, it's more important to know how to put them out. Over the decades, I've run closer to Gunpowder and mastered more techniques. My creations forever oscillate between destruction and construction, control and freedom, dictatorship and democracy. For example, I first painted my imagination of paradise, a mirage of temptations.
I exploded color gunpowder to create a sensual and dazzling garden, so beautiful that I didn't want to lay a finger on it. However, I picked up my courage and scattered black gunpowder all over this beauty, covered it with a blank canvas, and ignited it again. Done. When I removed the canvas on top, the once enchanting garden was now forever sealed beneath the black.
What shocked me the most was the canvas on top, which now looked like an apparition of that heavenly garden. At the end of 1986, I moved to Japan. My cosmology, which till then was a simple one, developed by stargazing and studying feng shui in Quanzhou, suddenly expanded to include the latest developments in modern astrophysics.
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