The Big Bang

In 1984, when he was still living in China, the artist Cai Guo-Qiang began experimenting with a very Chinese medium. And a very tricky one: gunpowder. He would sprinkle it on fibrous paper, then light it to create a "drawing" of burned residues. He moved on to produce outdoor "explosion events," using fireworks to create spectacles on the ground and in the sky that he related to Taoist ideas about destruction and transformation. By now, Cai (pronounced Sigh) is an old master of blast art. Which is funny, because at 50, he's a soft-spoken man with a modest manner. It's his art that makes noise.

There's certainly a feeling of midcareer big bang in "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe," the clamorous retrospective that opened recently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In the 13 years since he relocated to New York, Cai has moved on to many other kinds of art, including dreamlike sculptures and big theatrical installations like Head On--dozens of papier-mâché wolves galloping headlong into a glass wall. In the same period, he's also become a star on the global-exhibition circuit, a position the Guggenheim show certifies. The show also draws out the apocalyptic mood in a piece like Head On. It's not only gunpowder that gets burned in Cai's work. It's whole social orders being blown away.

Born in Mao's China, Cai knows all about societies in transformation. He revisits Beijing often these days to help design the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. But an ambivalence about his burgeoning homeland courses through his art. On the one hand, there's his 1998 piece Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows--a wooden boat flying a Chinese flag and pierced by hundreds of arrows. It has its sources in the story of a 3rd century Chinese general who had to gather arrows before a battle and did it by surprising the enemy with a predawn flotilla manned by straw sailors. The enemy responded with a hail of arrows that lodged harmlessly in the straw, to be retrieved by the wily general. To Cai, there's a metaphor in there about China's drawing strength from the opposition of other nations. "Even as it looks like it's being wounded," he says, speaking through an interpreter, "it's being rejuvenated."

On the other hand, there's Rent Collection Courtyard. It's a replica of more than 100 life-size clay statues that were originally crafted in Shanghai in 1965 as pure Maoist agitprop, a tableau of peasants being abused by a greedy landlord and his thugs. In 1999 Cai had a team of artisans reproduce the ensemble for the Venice Biennale. Set in a new context, as they are again at the Guggenheim, the figures took on a new meaning. They became artifacts of a bygone communist order and the lost power of its coercive spectacles.

Let the record show that contemporary art has coercive spectacles of its own. One of them is Cai's Inopportune: Stage One--a car-bombing presented as a Chinese-scroll sequence of tumbling white automobiles, blinking light rods bursting from them like fireworks--suspended down the length of the Guggenheim's vast rotunda. Cai sees it as a "contradictory presentation--very strong physical violence presented in terms of physical beauty." And there's no denying that the piece brings its share of wow factor to the rotunda. But it's also an instance of an artist playing air guitar with history--making a strenuous gesture to create the impression that he's summoning a powerful reality, when in fact he's merely toyed with it. All the same, it certainly fits the apocalyptic tenor of this show. When the smoke from all that gunpowder clears, there's still a whiff of brimstone in the air.

STEADY ART BEAT Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art and architecture at time.com/lookingaround