CAI GUO-QIANG: GUNPOWDER AND ABSTRACTION 2015-2025

White Cube is pleased to present “Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015–2025” heralds Cai Guo-Qiang’s return to London after more than two decades.

September 26 – November 9, 2025

This exhibition presents more than 30 works that span a decade of experimentation with gunpowder. Shifting between registers of the figurative and the abstract, the works negotiate a set of enduring dialectics within Cai’s practice: creation and deconstruction, control and chance – energies catalysed by the volatile properties of his chosen material. These tensions open a conceptual field in which Eastern philosophical tenets converge with Western art-historical lineages, and where motifs drawn from the natural world speak to vaster cosmic rhythms.

Cai’s engagement with gunpowder began in the early 1980s in his hometown of Quanzhou, a city in China’s Fujian province, where the prevalence of firecracker workshops ensured its ready availability. His earliest experiments were improvised and exploratory: canvases hung on the wall became targets for small detonations fired from toy rockets across the yard. These initial forays soon evolved into more deliberate actions, as he dismantled firecrackers to work directly with their powder, later obtaining raw gunpowder from the local factories to ignite on canvas in increasingly ambitious trials.

The artist first experimented with coloured powder while living in Japan in the 1980s, but soon relinquished it, finding its effects a distraction from the questions then central to his practice. Natural black gunpowder, in its austere, monochromatic state, better served his desire to probe metaphysical dimensions: the principles of traditional Chinese cosmology in dialogue with his emerging fascination with modern astrophysics, then newly accessible to him in Japan. For the next three decades, Cai worked exclusively in monochrome, using the material to give form to what he described as his ‘unruly, wandering thoughts’.