Ai Weiwei, probably contemporary China’s best-known artist, and Steven Spielberg, probably America’s best- known filmmaker, have both resigned as artistic consultants to this year’s Beijing Olympics. The former cited the Chinese authorities’ inclination to make the games into a “propaganda show” (raising the question of what exactly he had expected). Spielberg took a stand against China’s support of the Sudanese regime, arms for oil, and the ongoing horror show of Darfur. But, so far, the Olympics still has Cai Guo-Qiang. The most visceral, the most challenging and the most fascinating of China’s first wave of internationally recognised and now hugely successful artists, Cai promises to make the opening of the Beijing games a real blast.

Cai Guo-Qiang (it’s pronounced “psycho chang”) made his reputation with a medium all his own, his “Gunpowder Drawings”. Stunning works formed by the physical impact of explosions, these blackened surfaces are the haunting shadows created by the ignition of a fuse and the consequent explosion of a gunpowder charge. They are works that capture the brief but palpable moment of time between ignition and blast, the negative recording of the intense flash of light, the black yin to the white yang of the event itself. The “drawings” – which reflect on the Chinese invention of gunpowder, its traditions of pyrotechnics, of the contrast between dark and light and of the fleeting essence of a moment in time – have become one of Chinese art’s most powerful and recognisable manifestations yet they represent only a fragment of the work of one of the most profound and interesting artists on the contemporary scene. A quick spin up the spiral ramp of New York’s Guggenheim Museum reveals how deep and reflective that work can be, encompassing themes of history, ideology, politics, mythology, religion, technology and beyond.