The New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, featured in Season 3 of Art in the Twenty-First Century, has been honored with the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize. The prize, awarded by the city of Hiroshima, celebrates contemporary artists whose works express ways to promote world peace. As part of the prize, apart from the $41,500 award (¥5 million), Cai Guo-Qiang will have a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Fall 2008. Also in 2008, Cai Guo-Qiang will premiere two of his major projects to date: a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opening in early Spring, and his contribution to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, that will reach an estimated 4 billion viewers worldwide.
In addition to Cai, two other Art21-featured artists have previously won the Hiroshima Art Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko (1999), also from Season 3, as well as Nancy Spero (1996; in collaboration with her husband, Leon Golub), who is profiled in the upcoming fourth season of the series.
