MADRID, March 17 (Xinhua) -- An exhibition featuring gunpowder arts by Chinese-born artist Cai Guoqiang opened to the public on Tuesday at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, northern Spain.

    The exhibition explores Cai's creative universe that features new art forms such as gunpowder drawings and simulated outdoor explosion events, large-scale installations and social projects.

    It includes one of Cai's most spectacular installations -- "Inopportune: Stage One, 2004", which consists of eight cars pierced by light tubes, arranged in a sequential circle that starts with an intact car on the ground and dynamically progresses into a cinematic simulation of a car explosion.

    With some 50 works from the 1980s to the present, selected from major public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, the exhibition examines Cai's significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art and establishes his influence as a cultural producer of socially provocative artworks for large audiences.

    "Cai Guoqiang has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time," said Thomas Krens, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "He draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, Chinese medicine, and contemporary global conflict."

    The exhibition, which continues until Sept. 6, came to Spain after its success at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, where it became the most visited visual art show in the museum's history, and at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, where it was part of the cultural program for the 2008 Olympic Games.

    It is the first solo show devoted to a Chinese-born artist at the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao.

    Cai, a Chinese-born American, is internationally recognized as an artist, curator and creator of simulated large-scale explosion events, who has been active in exhibitions, biennales and public celebrations around the world for the last twenty years.

    He dazzled the world with his fireworks projects at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.