“My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” — Cai Guo-Qiang Quote

“My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.”

“I lived in Japan for eight years before moving to New York, but I was looking forward to a place like America to change my opinion on things and force me to come up with new perspectives.”

“I was growing up in a society that exerted a lot of control on people, and from both my personality and the social condition, I found gunpowder gradually as a very suitable medium for exploration.”

“It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.”

“I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.”