If you were driving on the 110 on Sunday just before sunset, you might’ve seen a colorful cloud drifting over from Exposition Park. And if you were anywhere within a few miles of the USC-adjacent park, you most certainly heard the rippling booms. So what was actually going on here?
The short answer: fireworks and art. The longer explanation: PST ART, the Getty-funded initiative that’s mounting more than 70 themed exhibitions at museums around Southern California, began this week, and to really kick its “Art & Science Collide” series off with a bang, the institution commissioned artist Cai Guo-Qiang to stage a daytime fireworks show at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.
Cai Guo-Qiang is best known for his drawings using gunpowder—which you can see at Pasadena’s USC Pacific Asia Museum starting this week—as well as his ephemeral, large-scale explosion events, which have ranged from a black, smoking Christmas tree on the National Mall to the astounding pyrotechnics that opened the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
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For WE ARE, the artist’s humanity-pondering, A.I.-fueled event at the Coliseum on Sunday, he employed drones, sparkling sticks of bamboo and sky-high blasts of powdery pigments in front of a crowd of roughly 5,000 on-field spectators. (For what it’s worth, the organizers note that his daytime fireworks use “organic, sustainable pigments and dyes rather than traditional pyrotechnics.”) The Chinese artist narrated the evening’s events through a live, A.I. translation into English that mimicked his very own speaking voice. In fact, he’s even fed his archives and philosophies into his own proprietary artificial intelligence model, dubbed cAI™, that the artist collaborated with on this piece and many others.
But you’re probably more interested in the loud booms than the A.I. aspects, so let’s dive right into that. After a kick through the uprights from USC’s Denis Lynch, an armada of drones moved into place above the former-and-future Olympic stadium’s cauldron. After first spelling out cAI™, they then formed the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, with a trail of black smoke cascading from each hovering dot. The second act of the evening moved into the bowl of the stadium, where thousands of bamboo poles ignited with circular sparkles and puffs of pigment—at one point, a zigzagging line of explosives ripped around the entire stadium like a traditional dragon. (If you’re here for the “what was that explosion?” aspect of this story, these would’ve been the first loud booms you heard, starting around 6:15pm.)
From there, WE ARE moved into billowing blasts of pigments both from the cauldron as well as the rim of the stadium. For the latter, the tropical-tinted plumes in the “Bird of Paradise” section were fired straight up and then drifted above the field to form a cloudy collage of color. The program was occasionally paused to allow for the smoke to clear, which was admittedly thick at times (and based on social media reactions from folks outside of the stadium, maybe not the most welcome sight after a week of highly visible wildfire smoke in the region).
However loud you thought the show was from afar, we can confidently say that the fifth and final act (appropriately dubbed “Divine Wrath”) just might be the loudest thing we’ve ever heard. (This was around 6:35pm for all of the boom-curious.) Fireworks crackled around every side of the stadium, and as attendees dusted off the bits of fallen paper from the mortars and made their way toward the exit, we’re sure at least some of them started Googling how soon they could expect their hearing to recover. WE ARE was a one-time event, but if you ever have the opportunity to attend one of Cai Guo-Qiang’s future explosions, you absolutely should—just maybe bring some ear plugs.
Check out some more of our photos from WE ARE below.
