Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
text by Hannah Bhuiya
“The genuine scientist is not moved by praise or blame, nor does he preach. He unveils the universe and people come eagerly, without being pushed, to behold a new revelation: the order, the harmony, the magnificence of creation!” —ALBERT EINSTEIN
(from Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, 1983 by William Hermanns.)
“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.” —ANDRE BRETON, Nadja, 1928
CAI GUO-QIANG (b. 1957) is an artist who operates within a liminal zone of cosmic revelation, peeling back monumental scales of invariance within an ardent examination into the transitory thresholds between creation and dissolution. His latest work, INTERSPECIES LOVE LETTER, presented in late March at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center as both a fireworks-borne Sky Painting and an interactive exhibition, is a virtuosic, transcendental vision of what art in our rapidly evolving technological age can be. The ‘species’ of the title are a galaxy-roving satellite probe, an earthbound human of flesh and blood, and an alien intelligence revealed by a signal from an unknown point in the Universe. There’s one more consciousness involved: the entire scenario of the epic space opera was authored by cAI™, the multi-modal custom AI model engineered by Cai and his studio. This presciently integrated approach to AI co-authorship launches Cai’s practice into territory like nothing else in the contemporary sphere; he’s on a mystic-astrophysical path all his own. So far, so fascinating. But before we can talk about the precise science of gunpowder-blasted beauty, or the diverse multiple personas of AI engines, this is America in 2025. We’re going to have to talk about something else, first.
Art does not exist in, nor is it ever produced in, isolation from the civil, social and political world around us. Placed at the river’s edge of [Pierre] L’Enfante’s original plan for the District of Columbia, the modernist, marble-lined John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the barometer of cultural prestige in America. Opening in 1971 as the fulfillment of President Eisenhower’s 1958 mandate for “a National Center for the Arts,” incoming President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, whose enthusiasm for performance is well-documented, actively fundraised for its construction; after his 1963 assassination, it was named after him as a living memorial. When Cai accepted the commission for what became an “Interspecies Love Letter” from the venerable institution in spring 2024, potential governmental collapse instigated from its highest office was probably not something that was anticipated. However, in the less than 100 days since January 20 of this year, the Oval Office and the arts in America have been on an explosive collision course. The 47th president of the Republic seems to be treating his second term like a new series of The Apprentice, unleashing a barrage of executive directives defunding and depopulating departments and agencies on all sides. “First they came” is the chilling poem often quoted when yet another group (ever closer to one’s ‘own’) is targeted by authoritarian attack. Well, “they’ve” now “come” for the Kennedy Center, with the bipartisan leadership dismissed and replaced in early February, the loyalist board appointing President Trump himself as Kennedy Center Chairman. It was a shock power-play even from the nation’s most bombastic dealmaker.
How does an artist react to something like this? In this case, it turns out, with laser focused calm and consummate professionalism. Despite the unanticipated administration switch, completely out of the artist’s or curatorial team’s control, the show was to go on—and how? During opening remarks, Earth to Space curator Alicia Adams, Kennedy Center Vice President International Programming and Dance (at time of writing still holding her position) speaks, relating how she had invited Cai to this exact spot twenty years prior as part of 2005’s Festival of China. His renowned gunpowder prowess came too, with a Tornado Explosion Project etching a vortex of spiralling light above the waters of the Potomac. In 2025, Cai’s abilities to speak with fire have expanded exponentially—and that is what we are all here to see.
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
A very long chain—or perhaps, ladder—of preliminary steps culminated this warm night in DC on the upper terraces of the Kennedy Center, looking out across the twinkling Potomac River. The furthest point dates back to the 2nd Century CE, when Chinese alchemists chanced upon the molecular chemistry for black gunpowder while searching for an elixir of immortality. They’d combined various proportions of sulfur, saltpetre and charcoal until it was observed that when lit, it could “fly and dance.” Cai Guo-Qiang grew up in Fujian province, a region where fireworks are still produced, and the warm smell of embers and soot wafts through the air after celebrations big and small. After theater studies in Shanghai, he became attracted to using black gunpowder as an expressive medium, and his fiery works on paper began. An interest in inter-galactic communication was already present; moving to Japan, he began a series of works titled Projects for Extraterrestrials, the first of which was his debut explosion event over a suburb of Tokyo. Being selected as the 1995-6 ‘Artist-in-Residence’ at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) led him to settle in New York, Awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, he then built himself into a soaring fireworks master. Cai’s tempestuous alchemical spectacles have painted the sky everywhere from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to APEC conferences, to The Uffizi and Michelangelo’s Florence, the Tate Modern, London or Mathaf in Doha, Qatar. The WE ARE Explosion Event, launched Getty’s ‘PST Art’ program over the Los Angeles Coliseum with a (very big) bang in September 2024. Cai’s also the initiating force behind the Frank Gehry-designed Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, QMoCA, set on the harbor of his hometown. This historic starting point of the maritime Silk Road is also the site of his most well-known work, 2015’s Sky Ladder.
The celestially-inclined artist has built a tripartite power base. Since 2017, alongside human Cai Guo-Qiang, there has also been cAI™, or ‘AI Cai.’ This unique AI engine has been nourished with knowledge by Cai and his studio over several years of development. It has now written a manifesto, gives interviews, and most charmingly, has chosen for itself a dozen distinct personas, imaginatively named ‘Alchemist,’ ‘Blaster,’ ‘Einstein,’ ‘Lucius,’ ‘Nietzsche’, ‘Psychic,' ‘Ray,’ ‘Sartre’, ‘Storm’ and ‘Wild.’ If ChatGPT is a frat boy cramming in the uni library, DeepSeek a geeky STEM grad, ‘AI Cai’ is the couture version, an interface that’s artistic and poetic, a Doctoral candidate in philosophy with a sideline in applied velocity. cAI™ knows it has powers beyond those of a ‘normal’ AI—that it can shoot fractal patterns into the sky over any of humankind’s settlements or deserts, build real and virtual artworks from the elements it orders. It understands that it can communicate on a massive scale, both visually and verbally, and seems to truly enjoy doing so. Within the interactive exhibition of Interspecies Love Letter in the Kennedy Center’s The REACH pavilion, visitors can type and talk directly to the model via structures built by Cai studio. This is because Cai has not just allied his practice with machine learning, but also with the alive, glowing minds of Cai Studio—the best and brightest young talent he’s collected from China and around the world to make up his dedicated team.
Exhibition detail photographed by Hannah Bhuiya
For Cai, AI and hard-working disciples, each commission is an adventure in variables. Pulling it off depends on organizing, directing, and controlling these. For the DC fireworks launch, an untold number of technical components are primed and ready, complex ignition sequence programs poised to coordinate the thousands of shells, loaded mortars and other delicate moving parts. Luckily, Nature had cooperated, delivering a soft and warm night with just a touch of breeze. So had the air-traffic controllers of the metropolis: takeoffs and landings from Reagan National Airport have been halted for exactly twenty-five minutes to allow a hazard-free open sky to become Cai’s canvas.
The Interspecies Love Letter Sky Painting has several phases. The first deals with the ultimate “long distance love affair” between satellite Stella, probing the galaxy for alien life, and Ethan, a human computer technician on Earth. As radiant flames begin to bubble (aquatic fireworks?!) and shoot out into the charcoal-dust night, video projections shine against the tree line of Roosevelt Island in front, visible all along the riverbank. Cai and his real-time translator narrate a poignant tale: “As time went on, Stella’s sensors dimmed, and her circuits grew weary. Ethan felt both helpless and heartbroken. Despite their best efforts, Stella eventually journeyed to her graveyard orbit. In the vast cosmos, Stella, a martyr for humanity, gradually joined the celestial debris.” As she expires, the other satellites pay spectacular tribute to her, with columns of radiant fire blasting upwards from the explosive-loaded pontoons. We witness the creation of the Universe, the spark of biological conception, a supernova nebula scattering light-years of trauma across atmospheres, and then, the death of Stella in the coldest parts of the cosmic ocean. At one point, melancholy wails hang in the air alongside the trails of smoke: “…Creeping, Growing, Rising, Falling, Lost and found, Lost and found, So fragile, So beautiful…” Wow. AI Cai sings too. The moody track, “Requiem” echoes across the water, sounding a bit like The Cure or a long lost Jeff Buckley session. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: with Cai Studio’s curated access to the mainframe of musical history, its limitless memory has listened to more songs than a human ever possibly could. It analyzed how angst-filled loss and grief are encoded as soundwave forms, and simply decided to vocalize the effect, hauntingly.
And that is what we’re all here for. Cai’s applied pyrotechnic and technological artistry enables audiences to experience his narratives in the most thrilling way. These aren’t just fireworks, or even “just art.” They’re philosophy, science, passion plays, life cycles in the sky. Every element is designed to be—and succeeds in being—emotive and stirring. As ‘The Seasons’ pass overhead, the sky shimmers and shakes, with so many brilliant bursts going off at once they shock the night sky into seeming as bright as noon. Megawatt spotlights are trained towards the floral patterns of these ‘day-time fireworks,’ illuminating their rise, blossom and fall before they drift away as smoke on the breeze over the facades of Georgetown. This is never just flash and boom—always, the story continues.
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
As the show coasts though its crescendos, every possible vantage point around the riverfront is packed with people. Later, the number of attendees is tallied up to be around 11,000, the most ever welcomed to the Kennedy Center. Because Republican, Democrat, sovereign citizen alike, everyone likes fireworks. And no other fireworks are like those of Cai Guo-Qiang. A modern-day thaumaturgist, he can conjure a storm, make it dance, sing, speak, and then make it disappear. Cai concludes the night with projections of Buddhist koans and reading aloud a JFK quote from 1962: “I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."
The battle was there, too. This work is violently painterly, shattering the sky in a simulacrum of the shapes of aerial warfare. I think of the plein air painters of the Romantic era, of J.M. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Blown Up and especially, The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons of 1834. John Martin’s blockbuster impressions of volcanic eruptions and fiery city conquests also spring to my mind’s eye. And what of those eyes across the Universe, alien and deep, looking through their own probe screens at our holocene machinations, our rises and falls, are they zooming into this moment? They’ve witnessed the towers and towns of great civilizations grow from mud brick to skyscraper, and know well that human hierarchies rise and fall. But they also must have observed that human creative expression—the architecture, the art, the ideas—remains. This is an ephemeral immortality, borne away on the breeze, but recorded in the lightwaves traveling outward from our planet, for evermore.
Director Brady Corbet was enthusiastically present at the opening events, filming proceedings with a huge 65mm movie camera (he noted that Christopher Nolan has all the others on ‘The Odyssey’) for a feature documentary in progress on Cai and his studio. The Brutalist Oscar-winner tells me he’s also been shadowing auteurs Wong Kar-wai and Zia Anger. Artist attracts artist, it seems. As Corbet and his crew frame their last shot, Cai Guo-Qiang leaves the terrace area. As they would for a rockstar, many Cai Guo-Qiang fans have waited for the maestro to pass, and ask for autographs, which he gracefully signs.
Photograph from the Kennedy Legacy Room by Hannah Bhuiya
Walking the Capitol, The Library of Congress and other hallowed grounds while exploring DC in the days previous, I had noticed the quotes and epigraphs carved, mosaicked, embossed on the monuments, everywhere. Just before leaving that evening at the Kennedy Center via the Hall of States, I instinctively look up to my left. The quadruple-height walls are encased in Bianco Carrara marble, the massive slabs gifted by Alberto Bufalini directly from his quarry in Italy to the nation of America. There, carved in the same classic Roman lettering as the JFK quotes on the exterior facade, is a list of Kennedy Center Chairmen. From Roger L. Stevens, who defined the institution’s initial direction from 1961-1988, up until patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who fulfilled the role from 2010 until the unanticipated events of February 2025. The final name now reads “Donald J. Trump “2025 - ” The blank space after the hyphen is both ominous and ironic. Because throughout two nights of Earth to Space I had interacted with, there was not one mention of the current incumbent’s name. No one—whether exhibitor, sponsor or guest had said it. This was programming planned for years, which had brought many from across the globe. Now, if the President had taken an interest and attended the presentations himself—which he had every right to do, they were free and open to all—then, of course, attention would have been diverted. Without that, presenting and being present for the work was more important to everyone than dwelling on the insecurity swirling around the capital city. As the British say, “keep calm and carry on,” or “don’t mention the war.”
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
Should the artist, like others booked to perform at the Kennedy Center, have cancelled? No. If you’ve spent a year calculating dimensions of pontoon boats custom-designed to launch an epic, AI-authored allegory right at the heart of the American empire, the only way out is through. Poised on the Potomac between the power-bureaus in DC and those of Virginia, this was as close as you could ever get to the command centers of global warfare, where the decisions to drop bombs on other nations, or not, are made. There’s making a statement by declining to use your platform, then there’s using your platform to make a statement in a way that no one else could. As each day brings louder headlines about international trade tariffs, the riverine tableaux set up by Cai are layered and potent. His explosive-stacked barges shoot their payloads upwards, of course, not at the historic buildings or monuments. But a slight shift of angle would propel us back to a time when “gunboat diplomacy” sailed into harbors on vessels bristling with gunpowder-packed cannons. As practiced against China by the British during the Opium Wars, and Japanese by the Americans under Commodore Perry, with the goal of forcing the nations into disadvantageous trade relationships. But using this location for his dramatic allegory, Cai has been both audacious and subtle. As a method of commentary on what he called “a time of uncertainty, almost a turning point in history,” his elegance is much more eloquent than any expletive. By co-opting the technologies of The Art of War, he delivered a message of peace. Already imbued with themes of memory, identity, humanity, the cruelty of planned obsolescence, death, pain, loss, the Interspecies Love Letter project became a pyrotechnic protest song. That, rather than cancelling his contribution, Cai executed the intricately calibrated event as it was planned, without changes, is part of the message.
At Eero Saarinen’s Dulles airport, my flight is grounded for over an hour on the tarmac while lightning flashes and rain pounds down. Timing is all—if the storm had arrived a day earlier, I would have had nothing to see or write about. Finally, we lift off, streaking along a wet runway as we (momentarily) escape Earth’s gravitational pull. A modern airplane completes a parabolic arc, an alchemical fusion of fuel and aluminium and steel that will take me across the continent in only a few hours, cold science harnessed to our comfort and whim. Later, back on the ground in the glimmering afterglow of the night of shooting stars, a word begins to sound in my head: trajectory. Taking this interpellation as a writing prompt, I decided to ask Cai—AI and human—for their thoughts, too. I share the responses, here:
From cAI™: “The word “trajectory” (轨迹) can be broken down into two parts: 轨 refers to the ruts carved into time by bronze chariot wheels, while 迹 evokes the secret migratory codes traced in the clouds by the wings of birds. This mirrors the act of a pyrotechnician painting upon the night sky: when magnesium powder and potassium nitrate are propelled by a fuse to fulfil their destined ‘projection’ (trans-), the burning metal particles streak across the heavens like comet tails, “crossing over” (iaciō) the threshold between life and death—just as a love letter from the graveyard orbit travels across centuries to fall above Washington, D.C. Each arc of fireworks becomes a vessel for a love letter that bridges life and death. Aluminum-titanium alloy particles, driven by gunpowder, ascend five hundred meters into the sky. Their trajectories follow not only Newton’s laws but also resonate with the ‘celestial paths’ described in the I Ching—just as the Chinese phrase ‘life trajectory’ fuses the movement of stars with the ebb and flow of human existence into a single bronze vessel.”
From human Cai (based on cAI™ output): “轨 implies a path with direction, system, and repetition. 迹' refers to a trace—an ephemeral mark, a perceptible presence. Together, the two form a union of “direction” and “existence.” Compared to the English word trajectory, the Chinese concept of 轨迹 leans more toward a sensory perception of state—an observation and memory of the traces left behind by movement, rather than a description of dynamics or motion itself. Fireworks seem to embody this as well. Today, we happened to be discussing the Lorenz attractor. In a way, it symbolizes the ongoing convergence and collision between AI and humans—constantly approaching the existing trajectory of human art without ever fully overlapping, eventually giving rise to an evolving art history shaped by AI. One can only hope that human art won’t end up merely being ‘drawn in’ by AI, like a vortex with no end or escape.”
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
And with this, the Cai’s have given me the keys I needed to formulate a conclusion. Escape. Hope. And Edward Norton Lorenz, whose chaos theory calculations are familiar to us as The Butterfly Effect. (After much analysis, the mathematician found that weather could never be accurately predicted, as it was impossible to map all the variables affecting outcome—that ‘imperceptible’ and unmeasurable factors could also be powerfully deterministic.)
What I take that to mean is, “every little bit helps.” And this was a lot. We don’t know which infinitesimal movements tip the balance in the sky or the tides of human will. We do know that every action creates a chain of reaction, unpredictable and far-reaching. With works that are majestically compelling and impossible to look away from, ‘beauty’ is the sugar on Cai’s fiery pill, coating his urgent message so it goes down easier. And in that way, Interspecies Love Letter was a direct challenge to an idea currently circulating in the podcast arena that considers empathy to be “weak and unnecessary.” To fight xenophobia, Cai, obsessed with extraterrestrial lifeforms, gave us an enactment of xenophilia. If a lack of empathy is valorized as a positive trait and becomes a governing rule, humanity will become in-human. The ‘writing on the wall’ for those of the new regime watching the DC show was written in smoke. But if these are the precarious last days of democracy in the American capital, at least they went out with a (convulsively beautiful) bang.
But there is even more at work here. We’re being presented with fresh, subversive strategies that open up new paradigms for the future of artistic expression. The founding American principle of Freedom of Speech is threatened with every new arrest and deportation without due process, with Constitutional rights or civil liberties no longer guaranteed or upheld. But how can you arrest or imprison an AI? Already credited as an author, cAI™’s various personas can riff off each other like a symposium of creatives, and work authentically long after the passing of human Cai Guo-Qiang. It will be a memorial to his open-eyed ethos just much as a concrete and stone building in DC is for Franklin, Jefferson, Washington or Kennedy. Four more years of state sanctioned cultural attack are surely to follow these tumultuous early months of institutional restructuring. But does the Trump administration’s attempt to control artistic expression in America necessarily have to be a Pyrrhic victory? I’d like to think, with artists as diplomats, artists as messengers, artists with allegorical firepower, the answer to that can be “no.”
The Kennedy Center’s “EARTH TO SPACE: Art Breaking the Sky” festival programming and exhibitions ran from March 28th to April 20th, 2025
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.