As fate would have it, the biannual “Spring 2025 ArtNight Pasadena” event is taking place on March 14th—winter’s coldest, dreariest, and rainiest day. Accordingly, you select the handful of venues most likely to feature contemporary work, then set off.

An hour and a half and four stops later, you’ve experienced about fourteen seconds worth of satori. It doesn’t seem at all sporting to break out the big critic-of-the-western-world guns for students’ AI-generated superscript, semipro portraiture, or a series of selfies.

Your fifth and last scheduled stop doesn’t seem promising at all. What manner of contemporary art could possibly be intermingled with 16th-century kimonos, Thangka paintings, and Silk Road curios at the USC Pacific Asia Museum?

No sooner have you set foot in the first of what a docent informs you is one of thirteen halls showcasing the lifework of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang than—kapow! You’ve leveled up to “A Material Odyssey,” literally the most explosive exhibit anyone can attend today in any museum on any continent. Confronted with Crater, a “painting,” if you will (read on), that’s a verisimilitude of everyone’s favorite lunar pockmarks with the bonus of protruding off the canvas ablaze in burnt orange and flint bas relief, you don’t know enough yet about its molecular makeup to realize why it’s so captivating—but you’ve just been instantly teleported to another way station in the cosmos.

Exceptionally well-written wall text and looped videos inform you that Cai’s schtick is “painting” with gunpowder, singeing it this way or that, filming the process from a variety of angles (making sure we catch glimpses of his army of assistants scrambling around). He then springboards from an attention-grabbing gimmick to live happenings on a grand scale—he served as fireworks maestro at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and shocked the bejesus out of a crowd of 5,000 this fall at the LA Coliseum—confirming that this master of metaphysics and purveyor of pyrotechnics also happens to be a gigantic ham.

You’re stunned that this industrious Cai fellow is killing it all over the Pacific Asia, utilizing at least five different mediums ranging from the size of a human forearm (one frozen in time after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, perhaps) to large-scale compositions the length of stretch limos. Counting this collection, which you’re staring at bug-eyed, as just another stop on the Art Shuttle bus is a bit far-fetched. This guy’s a ringer! It’s as if someone had let Bruce Lee loose in an Intro to Kung Fu class.

Speechless, you find yourself copywriting in your mind, bullet-listing a few of the gazillion reasons to attend:

• Curious about what life on Earth looks like through the eyes of aliens? Seven-panel gunpowder-on-paper works, such as Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9—less womb-zoom than a miniature Buddhist monk caught in the crosshairs of a rusty, post-Armageddon gunsight with accompanying Hanji notations—have you covered.
• Fed up with materialistic holiday excess that almost feels government-mandated? Then you’ll relish watching the ritual obliteration and transformation of a three-story Christmas tree adorned with matte silver baubles into a floating, black haze facsimile of itself on the grounds of The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., no less.
• Perhaps you’re fascinated by Egyptology and/or you’re a contemplator of the cosmos? Imagine the chi boost you’ll get from hanging a massive mural, such as Inverted Pyramid On The Moon: Project For Humankind No. 3—eight panels of everyone’s fave geometric mausoleums, inverted and right-side-up, augmented with what could be drone shots of the Hawaiian archipelago if they’d survived a wildfire—in your great room.
• Have you ever pondered whether daytime fireworks are a thing? Yeah, they are, as evidenced by videos shot at cradle-of-civilization locales like Florence and Pompeii. Cai himself dramatically intones the “5-4-3-2-1-fire!” countdowns.
• Seen one too many Tibetan mandala paintings? Always wished someone somewhere would nuke all those finely crushed multi-colored minerals into abstract expressionism? If so, I give you Return to Darkness, a lustrous, more molten departure from the gunpowder series. The before: sand shaped into sacred geometric patterns. The after: a non-representational slab of blue-violet marble with an anomalous chalk-white vein

You’re still dreaming up ad copy as you drift off to sleep, imagining yourself climbing Cai’s Ladder to the Sky; 500 meters of golden-colored fireworks latched to copper fuse material, revealed, rung by rung, as it ascends heavenward, oddly exuberant after this ebullient bombardier lit the fuse.

The Cai retrospective is a super surprising and visceral departure from more familiar mediums. It contains angst! Transformation! Ephemera! It’s got to be cathartic to traffic in explosives. There are some things you want to admire from a distance; there are other things you might want to blow up. This art speaks to that latter, almost primal urge—it’s beauty in destruction.

ArtNight Pasadena has come and gone, but the incendiary “Material Odyssey” show runs at the Pacific Asia through June 15, 2025. You can think of a lot worse places to play date-night hero.