Cai Guo-Qiang and Pompeii

Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist known throughout the world for his exciting performances with fire, presents in this volume the works created in Naples as part of the project ‘In the Volcano’. With these works, resulting from his ‘explosion workshop’, the artist created a short circuit between our present and the memories of ancient Rome. Cai Guo-Qiang, as a modern Prometheus, plays with his mastery in dominating the fire, and drawing on the powerful and suggestive traditions of the oriental world he crafts pyrotechnic works and performances with which he invites us to rediscover the inescapable bonds between the classical past and the modern sensibility, and in particular between the explosion that in 79 A.D. destroyed Pompei – paradoxically preserving it for us – and artistic creation.