Firework artist kicks Olympics off with a bang 点燃奥运

Cai Guo-Qiang, architect of the Olympics opening ceremony pyrotechnics show, has spent two years preparing for this solemn moment.

To said that the Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang has exploded on his contemporary art scene is no exaggeration. Best known for making art fire exploding gun powder on the paper as well as using its explosives in mass-scale public events. Cai's tacked to be the visual director of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies where he'll stage his biggest ever pirate technique spectacle in the 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 athletic feat in itself. 35,000 shells will be lauched from dozens of different sites expanding more than 2 miles from Tian’anmen Square to the Bird's Nest. While no a longer a resident of his native China. This won't be the first time Cai's designs light up China's skys. In 1994, he added on to the Great Wall with fire and gun smoke.

He was able to bring a hundred volunteers from Janpan to lay down this ten thousand meters of fills lines to extend what literally to extend the Great Wall, literally a 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, New York, brought in record numbers. But he is understandably a little / about putting on the world's biggest fireworks displayed.

At the Olympics, there's just this one moment. The whole world is waiting in their anticipation, watching for their 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 to the bang, as his shell assures him in the 2008 Olympic Games.

Gara Brown, ABC News.