Numerous articles have been written about Cai Guo Qiang and multiple studies elaborate on his works. Frankly, I had never seen any of his works in person, until the Singapore National Museum asked me to come and see the installation Head On in Singapore, which totally knocked me out----in the beautiful sense of the word.

There and then, I was overcome by a sense of the mythical and the primeval as I entered the dark room where a pack of wolves seemed to be running, and howling in the vast space of the night galaxy. They ran and did not seem to care that the front runners had clashed with an invisible wall, they just ran on. And as I stood there, I thought of what Jane Ittogi, the chairperson of the board of the Singapore Art Museum had said earlier in her speech: “....to see Cai’s work in the same space we are in---the same physical space---we become more engaged, and the overpowering presence and vigorous physicality of the work, opens some new territory of our mind”.

Looking up at what appeared like the universe at night time, where a dominating pack of wolves were running and houses were burning in Illusion II, an additional video installation right behind the surging wolves and Vortex, the drawing using gunpowder on paper to depict hundreds and thousands of wolves chasing one another, I became strangely aware of the depth of meaning that the artist had put into this stunning, terrifying, awe-inspiring installation with its raw poetic beauty appealing to beware of blindly following the masses.

“I wanted to depict the universal human tragedy which results from storming ahead blindly. The uncompromising way we try to achieve our aims. In Zen there is the notion of tragic beauty which is based on the fact that most of these actions are completely senseless”.

Head On, which will be on show in Singapore until 31 August 2010, was commissioned by the Deutsche Bank in 2006; and of course it primarily relates to German history and the Berlin Wall, but the installation is such that it is open to multiple interpretations. Scholars and historians have indulged in historical and theoretical elaborations, but the lay person will just let their feelings and innermost senses 'speak'.

For me there was a sense of standing in another period of time, and yet, past and present were flashing through an intense awareness of being part of this universe, where I seemed to be captured by alternating sensations of terror and admiration. Although told that the wolves were made of sheep skin, the saying “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” did not occur to me just then, neither did the open mouthed wolves on the floor remind me of that ugly part of the children's story where Hans Christian Anderson lets the wolf take the place of the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood. At some point I was thinking, what if these wolves were werewolves, those incredible humans that in Greek mythology or common folklore transform into wolves?

No doubt the dark painted space in which I was standing with that pack of rushing wolves and the red flames from the video that sparked in the dark, added to that touch of the primeval, of beauty and a sense of the dramatic, but above all of foreboding.

The preparations for the installation in Singapore were the shortest in his entire career, revealed Cai. But he was completely satisfied with the results. ”I am happy that I am able to assemble the installations here in one square room, in a holistic manner and in a way I have not done before.”

The life-sized wolves had an air of the real. But the 99 animals had actually grown out of small clay models which started as movement studies, and had no real remnants of wolves. They were fabricated from painted sheepskins, and stuffed with hay and metal wire, with plastic lending contour to their faces and marbles for eyes.

Cai's phenomenal linking of the past with current issues of global concern may be sought in his artistic genius, but the values with which he grew up are equally of note. His grandmother and his mother, he says, adhered to the tradition of their forefathers. They believed in the power of invisible things that were part of everyday life. “And now it is expressed in my art.”

Having lived with the invisible, at some point in his artistic life he must have felt an urge to make it visible in his art. When asked, whether he had been inspired by Chinese philosophy, he did not offer a direct answer, but instead referred to Communist art practice. “In Communist art practice, the work made was always simple and easy to understand by the masses”. He credits his interest in history to his father who he says is a historian. “As a Chinese person, you deal with history a lot, it's simply a duty”, he once said. “I also have this from my father.”

Similarly, his obsession with gunpowder relates to his culture. “In Chinese medicine, gunpowder is a remedy, something alchemistic, invented in the search for immortality. Through an explosion, gunpowder also creates something that is sacred. It also opens up a dialog with fire, the hidden power of fire.” The way Cai makes this happen may not always be everybody's cup of tea. For the video that captured the images for Illusion II, for instance, a typical German house was especially constructed, then filled with various types of fireworks and blown up on July 11, 2006. While it resulted in a beautiful view in the sky, it also evokes questions about the sense of such a spectacle. In many parts of the world, fire happens all the time, destroying the livelihoods of poor people. But perhaps, this is exactly what the artist had in mind, to convey insights into the fallacy of external beauty.

More complex is the way he made his gunpowder painting, titled Vortex, presented in the same exhibition. First hemp paper is spread out on the floor. Individual stencils are laid down beneath cardboard and rocks and various types of gunpowder is applied, then lighted and everything disappears beneath a thick cloud of smoke. When the smoke clears the stencils and rocks are removed showing the traces of the explosion with hundreds of wolves whose bodies form a giant vortex.

Cai's Singapore event took on a special meaning as he revealed his Southeast Asian kinship on the opening night, when relatives from his mother's side of the family whose ancestors had migrated to Malaysia, were in complete attendance.

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, the Seventh Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007, and the 20th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2009. He was also Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In 2008, Cai Guo Qiang's retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The artist has lived in New York since 1995.