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An "explosion event"

December 1986

Tokyo
Cai arrives in Japan, meets Alexandra Munroe
After his art-school graduation in Shanghai, Cai Guo-Qiang (pronounced “tsai gwo chang”) swings a visa for Tokyo. Alexandra Munroe, future senior curator of Asian art for the Guggenheim and future cocurator of Cai's retrospective, is there too. “I’ve actually known Cai since Japan,” Munroe says. “I knew his work then and I’ve been following it since." In Japan, Cai focuses on putting gunpowder to artistic uses, creating "explosion events" (one of which Munroe attended), and many of the scorched-paper “gunpowder drawings” from that period now cover the Guggenheim’s walls to represent his early work.