Cai Guo-Qiang valuation
Chinese artist who ignites gunpowder on paper and canvas to make drawings and paintings, and stages large outdoor explosion events.
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, in Fujian province, China, in 1957 and studied stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy from 1981 to 1985.
What a work by Cai Guo-Qiang is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, in Fujian province, China, in 1957 and studied stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy from 1981 to 1985. He moved to Japan in 1986 and worked there exclusively with gunpowder, and in 1995 he moved to New York, where he lives and works. He sprinkles gunpowder onto a support, weighs it down with stones and ignites it, so that the blast fixes the image; his early works of this kind were on Japanese paper, and he has since used canvas, silk, porcelain and coloured gunpowder. Drawings also accompany his outdoor explosion events, such as The Century with Mushroom Clouds (1996), and he directed the visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2012. The Guggenheim in New York held his retrospective I Want to Believe in 2008, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh showed Life Beneath the Shadow in 2005, and White Cube showed his gunpowder paintings in London in 2025.
Unique works include gunpowder drawings on paper, gunpowder paintings on canvas and silk, and porcelain panels. Scorch marks and burns are part of the work, but loose residue, tears and fading of the paper should be checked. A gallery invoice, the title and date, and any exhibition history should go with the work.
At a glance
- Born
- 8 December 1957, Quanzhou
- Movement
- Contemporary art
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
