Chinese people have used fireworks to celebrate festive occasions for centuries, but artist Cai Guoqiang uses pyrotechnics as a medium to convey contemporary art concepts.

His best-known work is Footprints of History, the celebratory fireworks project that lit up the skies above the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games' opening ceremony. The work featured 29 footstep-shaped sparkles along Beijing's north-south meridian that symbolized the arrival of the 29th Olympic Games.

Cai and his team of about 600 spent two years preparing for the display, which lasted about a minute.

"We are walking from history to a more splendid tomorrow," he said then.

"The north-south meridian of Beijing is a concentration of China's 5,000 years of history, and the footsteps heralded an Eastern giant that is to rise."

Cai also created the Cityscape Fireworks Show at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Shanghai in 2001, and directed fireworks for China's 60th National Day in 2009 in Beijing.

In his Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No 10 in 1993 in Jiayuguan, Gansu province, a line of fiery towers snaked over and around the dunes past the Great Wall's endpoint. His recent daytime Black Ceremony in Doha, Qatar, paid tribute to Arabs who traveled to, and died in China in ancient times.

Cai began to explore contemporary art in the early 1980s. While learning from the West, he was also searching for his own artistic language from his own culture.

"The deepest influence that Western art has on me is an understanding that you can challenge tradition and explore the future," he says.

Cai was born in Quanzhou, Fujian province, where fireworks are a staple of festivities, weddings and funerals.

He explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings while living in Japan from 1986 to 1995. His investigations led to his experimentation with explosives on a massive scale and to the development of his art.

Cai's pyrotechnics draw from Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual framework. He tries to create an exchange between viewers and the universe around them, using a site-specific approach to engaging culture and history.

"To me, gunpowder is something sexy," Cai says.

"It has an uncontrollable intensity that inspires a physical desire in me."