Pompidou Center Honors Cai Guo-Qiang With Explosive Farewell — Paris Sky Blooms in “The Last Carnival”

By Richard Ren | LAPost | Paris — October 22, 2025

As dusk settled over the Beaubourg district on Tuesday evening, bursts of smoke and color rippled across the Parisian skyline. The façade of the Centre Pompidou—long regarded as a symbol of modern art’s restless spirit—was momentarily transformed into a living canvas. The artist behind the spectacle: Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese-born master of gunpowder and light.

In a spectacular send-off marking the museum’s temporary closure for renovation, Cai staged “The Last Carnival,” a 20-minute daytime fireworks performance that fused Chinese tradition, artificial intelligence, and architectural iconography into one unforgettable explosion of art.

The Pompidou closed its doors on September 22 for a five-year renovation project. Before the building went dark, the institution sought a gesture bold enough to match its own legacy—and found it in Cai, whose pyrotechnic works have illuminated skylines from Doha to New York. On Tuesday, before crowds gathered for Art Basel Paris, the Pompidou’s façade became his latest canvas.

“For the first time in its history, the Centre Pompidou’s façade becomes a monumental painting,” said curator Jérôme Neutres, who described Cai’s performance as “his most profound and complex work yet—an explosive dialogue between AI and the Parisian public.”

The performance unfolded in three acts—The Banquet, The Dawn of AI, and The Last Carnival.
Each chapter carried its own rhythm and resonance:

• The Banquet opened with a jubilant cascade of color, evoking the spirit of artistic communion and public celebration.

• The Dawn of AI introduced Cai’s custom-built AI collaborator, cAI™, whose algorithms helped shape the patterns of fire and smoke—an homage to the merging of technology and creativity.

• Finally, The Last Carnival erupted in an orchestration of color and light across the Pompidou’s iconic exterior pipes, a fleeting yet unforgettable fresco marking both an ending and a beginning.

Founded in 1977, the Pompidou Center has long been synonymous with avant-garde expression and bold experimentation. Its temporary closure for renovation—announced earlier this year—will see some 2,000 works from its permanent collection loaned to partner institutions worldwide, including Shanghai’s West Bund Museum.

But if Tuesday’s spectacle proved anything, it’s that even in pause, Pompidou remains a force of renewal. “This is not a farewell,” Neutres said. “It’s a detonation toward the future.”

The event has drawn praise from across the French and international art worlds. The century-old art publication ARTnews, founded in 1902 and regarded as one of the most authoritative voices in global art reporting, described the performance as “a monumental daytime fireworks display by renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, conceived using his custom AI model, cAI™—a fleeting fresco representing the Pompidou’s gaze toward the future.”

In its review published Wednesday, ARTnews emphasized that the show—organized in collaboration with the mega-gallery White Cube and staged amid the vibrant backdrop of Art Basel Paris, the pinnacle of the city’s art season—“transformed the Pompidou’s iconic façade into a once-in-a-lifetime performative painting.” The outlet echoed Neutres’s remark that “Cai delivers his most profound and complex work yet, in dialogue with both AI and the Parisian public.”

“Few artists can make the ephemeral feel eternal,” the review continued, noting that Cai’s gunpowder paintings and fireworks compositions have long challenged Western notions of permanence. “With The Last Carnival, he has turned smoke itself into a form of memory—an art that disappears even as it defines a moment in history.”

For Cai—born in Quanzhou, China, in 1957—The Last Carnival continues a lifelong exploration of transience, destruction, and creation. Known for his use of gunpowder as both medium and metaphor, the artist has spent decades redefining how art can occupy time and space. His previous honors include the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and major retrospectives at the Guggenheim and the Prado.

Yet, in Paris, this latest work felt particularly intimate—a collaboration not only with technology, but with history itself. The building that once embodied France’s radical artistic energy became, for twenty minutes, a vessel of transformation.

As the final plume of smoke dissolved into the evening air, applause rippled through the crowd. The Pompidou’s colorful pipes gleamed faintly in the settling haze—a reminder that even as walls close for restoration, art continues to expand outward, burning brightly in the sky.

“The Last Carnival” was a farewell written in fire, one spectator said, “and a promise that the story of Pompidou—like Cai’s fireworks—will never truly fade.”