Cai Guo-Qiang in person is gentle and soft-spoken. His art, however, is not.

Mr. Cai (pronounced “tsai”) is famous for his gunpowder drawings, in which he explodes gunpowder on paper or canvas, and for his explosion events, which he has created in cities all over the world, including several in New York.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective, “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe,” opening in February 2008, will include no new work, but should bring a new level of recognition to the New York-based artist, who is on the seven-person creative team for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. After closing in New York in May, the entire exhibition will go to the National Museum of China in Beijing, to be exhibited during the Olympics, possibly to Japan, and then to the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The exhibition is co-curated by the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens, and the museum’s senior curator of Asian art, Alexandra Munroe, and sponsored by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. At an event yesterday for members of the press, Mr. Krens said he has known Mr. Cai since the artist was a finalist for the first Hugo Boss Prize in 1996. Although Mr. Cai lost out to Matthew Barney, Mr. Krens liked the piece he exhibited so much that the museum acquired it. “Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan” is an installation of 108 traditional sheepskin boats, hanging from the ceiling and forming a curve like the spine of a Chinese dragon, with three running Toyota engines at one end.

Mr. Krens was further inspired when he saw Mr. Cai’s installation “Inopportune: Stage One” at Mass MoCA in 2004. Nine white Ford Tauruses were suspended in midair and pierced with blinking light tubes to create the illusion that they were exploding. Mr. Krens immediately imagined the piece reinstalled at the Guggenheim, with the cars suspended one above the other in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. “Inopportune: Stage One” has since been acquired by the Seattle Art Museum, but Mr. Cai will fabricate another version (with lighter cars) for the Guggenheim’s exhibition.

There will be videos of explosion events, as well as numerous gunpowder drawings, which Mr. Cai often uses as sketches for these events. The exhibition includes drawings associated with “Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9,” in which Mr. Cai exploded concentric circles of gunpowder while he sat at the center, attached to electrocardiogram devices, and the unrealized “Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 2,” in which Mr. Cai planned to explode dynamite along the ridge of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a major subject of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape painting.

The curators have coined the term “social projects” for works in which Mr. Cai has employed dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of people. For the 1999 Venice Biennale, for example, Mr. Cai recreated “Rent Collection Courtyard,” an iconic propaganda work from the Cultural Revolution. The original work, like Mr. Cai’s re-creation, was a Socialist Realist sculptural tableau of life-sized clay figures, depicting peasants bringing rent to their cruel feudal landlord. It was commissioned in 1965 by the provincial government of Sichuan from a group of sculptors at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. The original was installed in the courtyard of a former landlord’s mansion in Sichuan. Replicas in fiberglass traveled around China and Eastern bloc countries to spread the work’s political message.

For the 1999 Venice Biennale, Mr. Cai appropriated “Rent Collection Courtyard” in what, in an allusion to Duchamp, he called yesterday a “cultural readymade.” He brought to Venice a group of sculptors from the Central Academy, China’s most important art school, as well as an older artist who was one of the sculptors who built the 1965 tableau. While visitors watched, the team constructed a replica, sculpting clay on wood and wire armatures. Because the clay was left unfired, as soon as the tableau was finished it also began to fall apart, which was part of Mr. Cai’s intention. At the end of the Biennale it was thrown away. At the Guggenheim, the same process will occur, with Mr. Cai most likely organizing a group of sculptors from China to come and reproduce the work, although he is also considering using New Yorkbased, Western-trained artists.

Mr. Cai’s appropriation of “Rent Collection Courtyard” was extremely controversial in China, where many older artists, including some who had worked on the original piece, saw him as having stolen their work. A group of those artists mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit to claim intellectual property rights. Because the piece is still controversial, it will not be included in the exhibition in Beijing, where Mr. Cai’s exile status — he has lived outside of China since 1986 — makes him subject to accusations that he exploits Chinese stereotypes to gain fame in the West. “To give a solo exhibition to this young artist from overseas is already risky for the National Museum,” a former assistant of Mr. Cai’s, Jennifer Ma, said in an interview.

Although Mr. Cai has lived in New York since 1995, Ms. Ma translated for him yesterday at the Guggenheim. At one point, when a reporter asked if he could say anythingabouttheplans for theOlympics, Mr. Cai said with a wink that Ms. Ma is also a member of the creative team and is “the strictest when it comes to confidentiality,” so he couldn’t reveal anything in front of her — all of which Ms. Ma, of course, had to translate. But he said that, among the various ceremonies, the team is responsible for 16 hours of programming.

Even in translation, Mr. Cai was quite poetic. Asked to contrast his feelings about New York and Beijing, he said that, living in New York, he is able to experience its change more organically.

“I see it as a city of my own that is evolving with me, walking with me, growing with me,” he said. “Being back in China, you see that it is also evolving and changing, but not with you. It has its own pace, and there are many wonderful changes, but it is not at your will. This is not necessarily what you would envision for it to be, and you feel a certain distance.”

Outside of the Olympics, Mr. Cai also has a hand in China’s current museum-building boom, collaborating with the architect Norman Foster to build a museum in his hometown of Quanzhou.

Mr. Cai will not be setting off explosions in the Guggenheim itself, as he did in a work titled “No Destruction, NoConstruction:Bombing the Taiwan Museum of Art.” The artist noted yesterday that Mr. Krens had once suggested he do something similar at Mass MoCA, while Mr. Krens was spearheading that museum’s construction. “He said, ‘Watch out, I may give you the biggest museum in the world to explode,'” Mr. Cai said.

Mr. Krens still seemed yesterday to be itching for an explosion of his own. Mentioning that the scaffolding is scheduled to come off the museum sometime around the time of the exhibition, he joked: “Cai will probably set up some kind of an explosive charge that will make the scaffolding go up in smoke — and expose a brand new Frank Lloyd Wright building.”