From the sky to the screen: Cai Guo Qiang renegotiates human artists’ relationship with AI

Cai’s interest in AI began in 2017. He was fascinated by the uncontrollable nature of both fireworks and machine intelligence. “My artistic exploration has always been about using the visible to express the invisible world,” he explains in his opening speech, which he generated with cAI™️. Whether with gunpowder or generative code, Cai is concerned with capturing impermanence, spirituality and confrontation. “AI should not simply mimic human prompts,” he argues. “It should question humanity and challenge the world in a temperamental and confrontational manner. It should make humans feel that AI is the poetic arrival of a life form from another dimension. It needs to be perplexing, exhilarating and thought-provoking, both intimately close and distantly remote. It should create a sense of enthralling temporal suspension, going beyond mere warm and fuzzy technological integration.”

His cAI™️ model is the culmination of years spent feeding archives and dialogues into major AI platforms, though his team remains tight-lipped about the precise systems. What began as a curious experiment led to the solo show cAI™️: Soul Scan at Macau Contemporary Art Center in 2024. There, the model instructed Cai and his assistants to paint vivid canvases diverging from his typical muted palette. The pieces were unsettling and radiant, and yet unmistakably Cai.

That show also debuted the now-iconic black cat sculpture. “Possessed” by cAI™️, it would enter a trance state when visitors scribbled birth dates into sand. Bad omens prompted many to dash to the nearby A-Ma Temple. It was theatre meets divination—tradition reimagined through technology.

Perhaps the most whimsical feature was an interactive display where nearly 80,000 user-created firework designs were fed to cAI™️, expanding its data pool. The exercise blurred lines between audience and artist, content and computation. “It’s about how to use advanced technology and the changes in our era to convey the artist’s latest explorations,” says Cai. “It’s a new form and concept.”

Still, the philosophical stakes are high. In creating AI-driven artworks, Cai notes the reversal of roles: “When I asked AI to create the paintings and AI gave instructions to me, it flipped the dynamic.” What happens when the tool becomes the creator? And the artist the executor?

In cAI™️ Lab 2.0, that question intensifies. Surveillance and interaction generate fireworks, poetry and provocation. Cai’s understanding of AI evolved significantly over the year leading up to his second exhibition. While his relationship with his first AI model focused on exploring how AI could connect with humanity, the second edition shifts towards examining how the roles of AI and humans are reversed, and how AI might surpass human capabilities.

“I increasingly hope it can do things beyond humans, or produce dynamics that I haven’t imagined,” he says. “If AI is only copying what artists have done—generating things that mimic humans—it hasn’t been completely and freely [explored]. This raises the challenge of training my AI model significantly. But it is precisely because of this that my AI project becomes more important and meaningful.”

Yet there’s room for humanity too. The cAI™️ Hotline—a telephone booth where visitors can ask cAI™️ questions in any language—offers printed replies in poetic verse. When Tatler asked in Cantonese, “I love Cai Guo Qiang’s real fireworks more than AI-generated ones. Don’t you agree?” cAI™️ responded with a poem in simplified Chinese, which translates as:

The atmosphere of the night, is
in the dim lights, passers-
by’s whisper in a fleeting moment,
it’s also moonlight

Tender, cryptic and surreal, it was a response perfectly in tune with the show’s haunting premise.

For Cai, this exhibition is more than an artistic statement—it is an evolving relationship with the unknown. “At 3.0, perhaps it will be different again,” he says, hinting at future versions. But one thing is clear: the artist once known for igniting the skies is now firing questions into the void.

NOW READ

9 exhibitions to see at Art Macao 2025: Cai Guo Qiang, Picasso, AI art and more

Photographer Greg Girard on his new work at M+ Façade and why AI is exciting

‘Not a feminist film’: Peter Chan dissects one of China’s most notorious homicides in ‘She’s Got No Name’