The explosive sparks and fiery arcs that flared across the Himalayan range for Cai Guo-Qiang’s site-specific artwork The Rising Dragon quickly drew the ire of environmentalists. Staged in September 2025, the firework project was a realization of Cai’s Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 2, an earlier work on paper in which a dragon rises from a mountain range symbolizing art’s capacity to communicate beyond the human realm. Cai’s sustained use of fireworks and other explosive materials to produce dragon-like patterns at a monumental scale has often been interpreted as an experiment in confronting a formless sublime. While existing critical readings of Cai’s work remain largely preoccupied with its ontological stakes—not unsurprising given that Cai has long been canonized as one of the representative figures of Chinese avant-garde art of the post-1980s—the most recent round of controversies sparked by environmentalists on Chinese social media attest to a growing public awareness of the ecological price of this genre of artistic production. These controversies also reveal long-enduring complicity between contemporary art and the fashion industry. When local authorities affirmed the need to “assess the ecological risks” of the performance and demanded reparations from the artist and his sponsor, the Canadian outdoor apparel brand Arc’teryx, Chinese environmentalists celebrated a victory.2 Extraction builds itself into the environment, materializing in specific spatial and temporal configurations that have a corresponding aesthetic form. In this brief essay, I situate Cai’s work within Tibetan extractive formations to trace how extractive art reveals both the persistence of an extractive aesthetic and the operative logic of such a form under the settler-extractive regime in Tibet.
Aesthetics here should not be understood solely in terms of representational valence, but rather as techniques of rearranging spatial and temporal configurations in the process of producing extractive landscapes. Extractive aesthetics operates through, on the one hand, the imposition of a specific schema of perception that frames lands inhabited by ethnic minorities as reservoirs of exploitable resources, as “underdeveloped” or “empty land” (the settler-colonial myth of tabula rasa) open to planning, manipulation, and inscription.3 On the other hand, extractive aesthetics (re)engineer Indigenous territories into heterotopic spaces positioned as geographical Others vis-à-vis the expanding Han-Chinese-dominated metropolis—a spatial apparatus that simultaneously renders Indigenous peoples in Tibet ethnically othered. It is a production of an “outside” that is always available for extraction.
The extractive production of a landscape of otherness in Cai’s works is enacted through a process that I call geo-scription. For Cai, the traces of explosions are conceived as a form of writing: in his early gunpowder paintings, he “substituted the traditional colors of ink wash with the colors of gunpowder—combining explosive fieriness with the spiritual qualities of traditional Chinese literati painting.” His recent exhibition at the USC gallery similarly frames his explosive oeuvre as “an experimentation on materiality”—materiality here understood, according to the curators, in terms of the apparatuses of writing and inscription, the very apparatuses that mediate “human’s ability to harness elements and their relationship to a greater universe.”5 as it re-stipulates and authorizes the very sense of colonized land and water while annihilating Indigenous, non-extractive modes of relating to the earth and the ritual practices through which sense is given to nature.
Geo-scription allows us to take the reference to writing in Cai’s description of his own works not merely as a metaphor but as what foregrounds the modus operandi of extractive formation in Tibet within which The Rising Dragon should be situated. The tradition of land-art in People’s Republic of China is rooted in extractive projects imposed by the Chinese nation-state upon the lands of Indigenous ethnic minorities. The inscription of anthropogenic traces onto lands that, within settler-colonial narratives, are construed as “empty” enacts the Chinese national state’s claim to ownership of these lands and their subsoils, while simultaneously reaffirming its “civilizing” promise to “develop” and “modernize” these territories, a promise that functions to legitimize land dispossession and resource extraction. In other words, writing on the earth indexes a specific mode of production of extractive landscapes that is inseparable from a regime of knowledge production. Imperial-colonial practices of writing on and about land and its inhabitants—manifested through various forms of “-graphy,” from geography to ethnography sanctioned by the Chinese national state—accumulate vast quantities of data that, in turn, facilitate the conversion of Indigenous territories into extractive landscapes.
Cai has long been celebrated as a leading figure of the Chinese avant-garde and as a key new modernist artist of the 1980s.6 Yet the historiography through which this legacy has been taught and cited remains haunted, on the one hand, by lack of reflection on its Chinese exceptionalism undertone, and on the other, by an embrace of cultural cosmopolitanism. While critical scholarship has rigorously exposed the imperial formations underpinning European modernism, far less attention has been paid to Chinese post-1980s modernist art, even as China has, since that moment, become a crucial center for new global imperial formations. Moreover, as discussed above, the very notion of the “modern” has been mobilized by the Chinese nation-state to legitimate its settler-colonial extractive projects. The naïve celebration of “cultural differences” between “modernisms” in “the West” and “the East” obscures how cultural production is embedded within an extractive regime that dispossesses Indigenous ethnic-minorities—peoples who are often classified as neither West nor East—and whose experiences are bracketed off in contemporary (extractive) aesthetic forms.
The decontextualization of the ongoing extractivism in Tibet from Cai’s firework performance at Himalaya and the uncritical circulation and exhibition of images extracted from his geo-scription projects in US art institutes such as the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the MFA must be questioned. These images circulate with little acknowledgement of the extractive zone that conditions them, or of the violence such extraction inflicts upon Indigenous ethnic-minority life. The extractive formations that underwrite aesthetic production in contemporary China—and in the global art world more broadly—must, to invoke Macarena Gómez-Barris, be “unearthed.” New praxis and theoretical frameworks are needed so that contemporary art and art criticism might cease to “contribute to extractive capitalism”—a system in which China now plays an increasingly consequential role.Tianren Luo