万花筒 2008-08-09&-08-11 烟火大师点燃奥运（在线收听）

To say that the Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang has exploded on his contemporary art scene is no exaggeration. Best known for making art by exploding gun powder on the paper as well as using explosives in mass-scale public events, Cai was tapped to be the Visual Director of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies where he'll stage his biggest ever pyrotechnic spectacle in a country where fireworks were first invented.

In people's eyes, it's just a show. This is a pitfall for me. But this pitfall is also challenging to me to see if we can shake it up a little, turn it into art.

Cai has spent more than 2 years preparing for the event which promises to be an aesthetic feat in itself. 35,000 shells will be launched from dozens of different sites spanning more than 2 miles from Tian’anmen Square to the Bird's Nest.  While no longer a resident of his native China, this won't be the first time Cai's designs light up China’s skies. In 1994, he added on to the Great Wall with fire and gun smoke.

He was able to bring a hundred volunteers from Japan to lay down those ten thousand meters of fuels lines to, to extend the Great Wall, literally and metaphorically out into the Gobi Desert by ten thousand meters.

Cai has been celebrated for the grand scope of his works. A retrospective of his works at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, brought in record numbers. But he is understandably a little gun-shy about putting on the world's biggest fireworks display.

At the Olympics, there's just this one moment. But the whole world is waiting in anticipation, watching for that one moment, to see if anything will go wrong, whether the machines will mal-function?  Or natural forces, like torrential rains, which you can't control. It makes you worry.

But his efforts are certain to go off with a bang, as his show ushers in the 2008 Olympic Games.

Dara Brown, NBC News.