Q. and A.: Cai Guo-Qiang on Art, the Death of Nature and China’s Modern Reality

Last month, the artist Cai Guo-Qiang opened his new solo exhibit at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai with a literal bang — one of his trademark explosion events that this time had many local residents ducking for cover.

Mr. Cai, 56, one of China’s best-known artists despite being based for years in New York, is famous for playing with fire. He was the mastermind behind the pyrotechnics of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and he is celebrated for painting with gunpowder and staging outdoor explosions that leave smoke impressions to shift and disperse with the wind.

But the eye-catching opener to his environmentally themed exhibit, “Cai Guo-Qiang: The Ninth Wave,” frightened many people, who thought that they were experiencing an actual environmental disaster. Having had no warning, they did not realize that “Elegy” — eight minutes of multicolored smoke shooting up from the Huangpu River — was merely the most ephemeral of Mr. Cai’s works, the ensemble of which was inspired by the sudden appearance last year of 16,000 dead pigs floating down that same river.

In an interview, Mr. Cai discussed his art and the exhibit, which runs through Oct. 26. Excerpts follow:

Many people were caught unaware by the explosion and thought there had been a serious accident. Did you expect this sort of reaction?

The police were worried about this. They told us we weren’t allowed to ship gunpowder into Shanghai from Hunan. Then I went to go see them. I described to them what this thing was — it’s mostly just a lot of smoke. Then they didn’t want us to publicize the event, because if we did, a lot of people would come, and there would be traffic problems.

But without any publicity, lots of people suddenly heard these explosions — “Boom! Boom!” — and were terrified. They also saw this smoke and worried that it was pollution. It was very yellow. People wondered if it was toxic. But we used colored pigments, kind of like the ones from from India that they use in festivals. They’re harmless.

Has there been this sort of alarmed reaction to your explosion events before?

In other countries, there hasn’t been this kind of reaction. There’s less pollution elsewhere. And before, I did a lot more at night, when you can’t see the smoke.

It was 9/11 that made me want to start doing daytime explosion events. At night, everything looks very beautiful and perfect. The city doesn’t even look real. But by day, under the sun, you can see that the city truly exists, with all its people going to work just as normal. But then, there’s an explosion. This made a very deep impression on me.

There were moments in “Elegy” that were quite literal, where the smoke clearly represented flowers, and moments that were more abstract. What were you trying to express with the smoke?

I first pretended that nature was a person. In Chinese culture and poetry, nature, plants and animals are often represented as people. I wanted to express that nature was dead. I purposefully tried to turn this sadness that I feel for nature into the kind of sadness that I might feel for a person.

So the first act was a lament, trying to impart a certain sense of sadness. The second act was about memory — beautiful memories from the past. And the third was about solace. It’s an anthropomorphic representation of nature, expressing how nature is in the process of dying or has been injured.

The environmental message of your exhibit is quite direct, especially for China, where things are so politically sensitive. Did the museum, which is state-run, at any point object?

At the end of the day, the museum director let me do all the things I wanted. So I’m not too willing to say at what point she was swayed, because in the end she helped me realize this project.

Are subjects such as environmentalism becoming less sensitive in China?

There’s been an enormous change, with the rise of the Internet and people publishing news themselves. Before it wasn’t possible for the state-run media to express those kinds of opinions, but now they’re widely expressed on personal media. So Chinese society is slowly changing, allowing for different voices and viewpoints to be heard.

Some of the works in this exhibit have been shown all over the world. Does the meaning of these works change according to their context?

The written description I use for each work is the same no matter where it’s shown. It’s just that in most countries, they don’t pay much attention to what I’ve written, whereas in China they really take notice. For instance, for “Head On,” I wrote about the fall of the Berlin Wall. In China, this is a more sensitive topic, because of the collapse of socialism. Also, I write that this work is about the problems that arise when a collective acts blindly, about the blindness of these wolves all running toward the same goal. I say that if they’re doing this for ideological reasons, the consequences will be especially severe. I put up the same written descriptions in New York, in a lot of other places. It’s always the same words, but Chinese will pay more attention, because China actually has experienced this problem. They’ve lived through the consequences of running blindly after their own ideology.

You created several new works for this exhibit. Given that you often use symbols from traditional Chinese culture, do you take a different approach when creating works for a Chinese audience?

I’ve taken the Chinese audience into consideration in some ways. I chose to talk about the environment in order to create a dialogue with them. The other thing I did was dig up the floor. I feel that contemporary art in China today is much too commercial. The works tend to be in auction houses or galleries. This isn’t a bad thing, but I believe art should be a bit braver and shouldn’t always take such things into account.

Like my pool — after we dig it up, we still have to fill it back in again! There will be nothing left! But that kind of art is very important. You have to ask yourself why you’re making art, and how you’re doing it. These questions have taken a back seat to talk of the art market. So I feel there were two things — the first being the environmental theme, the second being thoughts about the overly commercialized art world.

After I dug up the floor, I poured in a lot of ink. I thought this was a good idea, because it looks like a Chinese construction site. Every city in China is in the process of construction. Then, inside the hole, I poured a lot of ink. This ink is very silent — it seems like it’s saying nothing, but in fact it’s saying everything. It’s also black — very silent — and then there’s a waterfall in the middle. This waterfall constantly circulates the ink. In traditional Chinese painting, people love to draw waterfalls. The concrete blocks that are stacked around the pool, they look like a traditional landscape, like Chinese mountains. So it’s a bit abstract, but it contains a lot of thoughts about Chinese traditional culture and China’s modern reality.

We must encourage Chinese artists to have a bit of courage, to focus a bit more on the process of artistic creation itself and put a bit more distance between themselves and the market.

What prompted you to tackle more political subjects in your work?

I used to be very opposed to the idea of art as a tool for social change. This time I thought: “I’m in China, and I’ve thought about these issues. I feel like I should react to them, so I’ll make something.” But making something is in the end still about creating art for myself, not to make society better. That’s not really my goal. But my art will participate in these debates. It’s a good thing to get a lot of people discussing these issues.

What draws you back time and again to animals as subject matter?

When I was young, all the art I saw depicting people was intended to idealize socialism. So I developed an aversion to drawing people. When I was in China, I usually painted landscapes and only rarely did people. But contemporary art must express people’s feelings and problems, so I use animals to express them. I’ve been doing this for years — from turtles, to snakes, to birds. It was only after 9/11 that I started using more ferocious animals, like tigers, lions and wolves.

After years of living in the United States, do you consider yourself a Chinese artist, an American artist, a global artist?

I would first say that my hometown is Quanzhou. It was a very open place and allowed me to become a very open person as well. We were very far from Beijing. We painters there never used art to serve politics, and we never participated in those national competitions. We always just painted what made us happy. This sort of energy really influenced me. Art is meant to express your own feelings, your own story. I’m not interested in expressing big questions or problems related to the government.

I’m a seed from that place that travels to America, to Japan, to Doha, to Ukraine, wherever — that then grows and develops according to the local climate in those places. My method is to enter a dialogue with the local culture, to find out where the problems in each culture lie and then, like a seed, throw myself into that culture’s soil to see what I grow into.

If you were to critique your own exhibit, what would you say?

I’d have done a better job of informing the public about the explosion event, so they could have come out and watched without being surprised or frightened by it. I feel quite bad about that, and apologetic toward the local residents. My whole purpose is to create a dialogue with the local people, no matter where I’m working.