Radiance of Spring: Sky Painting for Normandie Impressionniste

Green and purple smoke spreads across the daylight sky above Vernon, France, forming an image that exists only while the wind allows it.

For Radiance of Spring: Sky Painting for Normandie Impressionniste, Cai Guo-Qiang used daytime fireworks as a temporary painting medium. Inspired by Claude Monet's garden, the work brought green brushstroke-like forms and purple iris imagery into the air rather than onto a fixed surface.

The composition changed from the moment it appeared. Smoke expanded, mixed with the atmosphere and gradually dispersed. Its colours and outlines could not remain stable because the material itself was in motion. Wind, light and time therefore shaped what spectators could see.

The work connects Cai's long engagement with gunpowder to the history of painting, while exchanging the permanence of a canvas for an event that can only be experienced in its unfolding.

Presented as part of Normandie Impressionniste, the sky painting shows how an artwork can be materially brief yet visually expansive. Its disappearance is not separate from the image. It is part of how the image is made and encountered.