How to Preserve Gunpowder

When conservator Rachel Rivenc first encountered Cai Guo-Qiang’s work, the artist was known for his use of gunpowder and explosives as his primary medium.

His studio had approached Getty for help in preserving the color of the pyrotechnic powders Cai uses for his spectacular fireworks displays—a visit the artist described as nervously taking his children to the doctor. How was their health? Did they need any prescriptions or preventive care?

A conservation lab, after all, is a little like a hospital for artworks. It is where they are inspected, evaluated, and stabilized, and, if necessary, cleaned, repaired, and treated. When an artwork arrives in the lab, it undergoes in-depth examinations, and condition reports are filled out that document its overall health. The conservator’s task, in some ways, is to counter unpredictability, the inherently entropic nature of matter—how substances such as wood, paint, stone, and plastic are affected by time—and contain, or at least manage, that change. But the conservator also carefully studies authorial intent, probing where meaning resides within the artwork’s matter.

Rivenc, head of conservation and preservation at the Getty Research Institute, is drawn to challenging substances used in contemporary art, from biological materials like onion peels or breast milk to the forms and energy sources of kinetic art. Cai’s gunpowder works are also technically and conceptually complex, inspiring Rivenc to embark on a decade-long project to understand them better and see how they could be maintained for posterity. Her new book, Cai Guo-Qiang: The Artist’s Materials, blends biography, history, and chemical analysis to offer a unique perspective into Cai’s collaborative creative process and the nature of his unconventional and combustible medium.

The gunpowder works, Rivenc found, revealed a profound depth. Ranging from diffuse ash-colored drawings to multimedia to spectacular detonations that fill the air with smoke plumes, they are informed by the artist’s interests in Taoism, Chinese folk wisdom, and dark matter physics, while also remaining deeply personal. In his monumental piece Sky Ladder, for instance, an approximately 1,650-foot-long ladder of flames ascended into the atmosphere via a helium balloon, symbolizing the relationship between the earthly and the celestial. Recently, Cai inaugurated Getty’s PST ART initiative with the massive, public WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where over 1,000 drones released colorful fireworks into the sky.

The use of gunpowder—first invented in ninth-century China—reflects Cai’s upbringing in Quanzhou in southern Fujian province, where firecrackers are a regular part of cultural celebrations. But gunpowder also carries certain metaphysical qualities: deep poetic connotations about the nature of creation and destruction, chaos and order, ephemerality and eternity. While rooted in his experiences in China, he draws equally from many different cultural traditions, searching for the meaning of the mysterious cosmos. In his work, Cai says, he attempts to bridge the seen and unseen worlds.

As part of the process of understanding the physical properties of these works, Rivenc read scientific articles and consulted pyrotechnic experts. She attended Cai’s explosive events in various cities around the world and the Long Island company where he sourced his fireworks. She also had numerous conversations with the artist and his collaborators, making visits to Cai’s bustling Manhattan and New Jersey studios, where the studio team has daily family-style lunches. Most helpful, she said, was accessing Cai’s archive, which included some of his earliest notes and sketches. “It made me more aware of the living and cyclical nature of his work,” she says. “It’s almost like everything everywhere all at once. It doesn’t matter if the works were made 30 years ago or 10 minutes ago, he might return to an idea, especially if it has not yet been realized.”

The book is the first material study of the renowned artist’s oeuvre. In the end, says Rivenc, Cai’s work provides conservators with possible approaches for dealing with unknown and challenging materials, and an understanding of the artist’s intent will help conservators make informed decisions about the work’s preservation for the future. And while it might be unpredictable and impermanent, the meaning Cai creates from gunpowder—the feeling of cosmic awe—is enduring.