Cai Guo-Qiang's shift to gunpowder as a creative medium in the mid-1980s simultaneously ushered in his investigation into ancient Eastern philosophy, resulting in an art form at once breathtakingly original and new, while at the same time almost otherworldly in its timelessness. Cai once said, "Gunpowder has always existed objectively, but the crux of the matter, the goal of the artist, is how to transform it and make it an expressive form." In the hands of Cai Guo-Qiang, the medium of gunpowder is not just an instrument or a tool to be employed, but a material whose objective functionality can be repurposed for subjective expression. As early as 1961, the French modernist Yves Klein saw fire as a medium highly conducive to expressing feeling. He produced a series of "fire paintings" in which the natural forces of fire-its transformation, creativeness, destruction, and disappearance-became linked with art and creativity. Klein said, "Fire and heat are explanatory in a great variety of contexts, because they contain enduring memories of personal and decisive events we have all experienced. Fire is both intimate and universalK Of all phenomena, fire is the only one that so obviously embodies the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in paradise, and burns in hell. Because it can contradict itself, it is one of the enduring principles of the universe." Through his fire-themed works, Klein explored the material world, but Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder works, while extending the theme of fire's opposing qualities, go further in making gunpowder part of a distinctive creative vocabulary, one that grows from special insight into the medium and its unique qualities. Gunpowder, which first came into use in the 9th century, has for over a millennium been witness to the change of dynasties and the ebb and flow of historical fortunes. But gunpowder brings not just war's ruin and destruction, but joy of celebration as well, in the lighting of fireworks. It crosses over the dichotomies of life and death, motion and stillness, and Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder blast works, which combine carefully planned sequences of explosions with unknown and unpredictable elements, highlight even further the clashes and contradictions of gunpowder's nature.

Cai has said, "My religious concepts aren't expressed that obviously. But every work of mine, to some extent, has that kind of feeling behind it. Regardless of whether I use an explosion or an installation, what I seek is a dialogue with the unseen. What I mean by the unseen are the supernatural forces, the power of the universe, and the power of the soul, which intercede in our lives." Dragons became an important element in Cai work from the 1990s onwards, as he explored political and cultural themes in such pieces as Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, Flying Dragon in the Heavens, and Mr. Ye Who Loves Dragons. But beginning in 2000, with his Project for the Year of the Dragon No. 2 (Lot 2028), the dragon no longer served a narrative purpose in his work, which returned instead to the dragon's essential nature and meaning. Cai created direct visual representations of the dragon, which has been one of China's cultural icons and a constantly recurring presence in its myth and history for millennia. One such myth places the legendary figures of Fu Xi and Nu Wa in the primordial chaos before earth and sky were formed. After a great disaster, Nu Wa melted stones to patch the sky and created humans out of clay, making them humanity's earliest ancestors. The Jin Dynasty's Records from the Obscure Realm describes Fu Xi's body as dragon-like, and Nu Wa as resembling a serpent; for this reason, the early Chinese believed in dragons as the fundamental source of humanity, and their later generations are called "descendents of the dragon." At the same time, the dragon is the only animal in the Chinese zodiac that does not belong to the natural world. In choosing the theme for his Year of the Dragon project, Cai expressed through the physical form of the dragon the abstract concepts and cultural associations behind it. His Project for the Year of the Dragon No. 2 encapsulates all these meanings in one dynamic form. It represents the veneration for the dragon and the belief system surrounding it, and the way in which, over the generations, dragons have embodied the thinking and imagination in Chinese culture and society on subject of magical beasts.

The dragon, in Chinese legend, "has nine forms: his head that of a camel, his horns like a stag, with eyes of a demon and ears like a cow, his neck like a snake, his belly like a clam, with scales like a carp, claws like an eagle, and paws like a tiger." The description of these physical features shows a dragon that is modeled on natural forms and is actually an agglomeration of features from animals we see in daily life. Dragons descend into the deep oceans and climb into the sky, moving in both heaven and earth and transcending all human qualities. These qualities give them a position above all things and linking all things, whether earth, heaven, or man; the dragon thus symbolizes the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony between man and nature. In Project for the Year of the Dragon No. 2, Cai uses the varying depth and intensity of the streaks left by burning gunpowder to outline the form of a dragon and show it flying freely through the sky. Setting it against a contrasting white background, whose subtle washes of color suggest mist and steam, he depicts the dragon as a creature belonging to nature, but not limited by it. This same white background adds deeper meaning to the concept of the white or "empty" space found in traditional Chinese landscapes; because the undefined picture space blurs the viewer's sense of location and distance, we seem to view this scene across a vast expanse of time, uncertain of whether this flying dragon comes from the past, the present, or the future. Its mysterious existence conjures up flights of imagination and speculation about the true nature of its surroundings and the era from which it might come.

Confucius described the dragon by saying, "The dragon coils itself up, and there is its body; it unfolds itself and becomes the dragon complete. It rides on the cloudy air, and is nourished by the Yin and Yang." Wang An-shi's Dragon Lyric states that, "A dragon is a thing that can coil up or expand; it can be hidden or visible, weak or powerful, and tiny or immense." The dragon's ability to appear and disappear, like gunpowder's dual nature as either inert or dynamic, is a reflection of China's Yin-Yang theory and philosophy. When gunpowder explodes, its presence as a physical substance vanishes in smoke and cloud, and, like the dragon that none have ever glimpsed, it appears in various forms in various aspects of our lives. Cai Guo-Qiang has grasped these similar yet radically differing characteristics and made gunpowder blasts our gateway to a different world, noting that "my art is my tunnel through time." The occurrence of a blast in a Cai Guo-Qiang work momentarily obscures time and space; it collapses the daily familiarity of the space around us, along with the barriers that normally separate history and myth and humans from the world of mythical animals. Cai's Project for the Year of the Dragon No. 2 thus transcends temporal and geographical boundaries, and rediscovers the ancient mythic relationship between man and his environment. For our contemporary life, with a highly advanced society and technology, have gradually lost touch with our ancient myths, a work such as this reawakens our sense of a vast and unfathomable universe surrounding us in our smallness. The dragon, a symbol of our spirit, guides us back through the ages over which our cultures gradually came into being, to the place from which we ourselves and our cultures once began.