ROCKETS' RED GLARE.(fireworks artist Cai Guo-Qiang,)(Interview)

The Chinese may well have invented everything except the forward pass, but some of their most important inventions were accidental. Did you know, for example, that the Chinese characters for "gunpowder" translate literally as "fire medicine," because the alchemists who discovered it, in the eighth century A.D., were looking for a combination of minerals that would give their emperor eternal life? This information comes from the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose "Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park," scheduled for exactly seven-forty-five on the evening of September 15th, promises to raise the art of fireworks to a new level. The event, which caps a summer-long celebration of the Park's hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, will take place in three stages: "Signal Towers," five towering geysers of colored fire at locations ranging from the Heckscher Ballfields, near West Sixty-fourth Street, to the Reservoir, at Ninety-fourth Street; "Light Cycle," three horizontal rings above the tree line, giving way to a gigantic vertical ring, a thousand feet in diameter, that hangs over the Reservoir; and "White Night," a canopy of brilliant, slowly descending white light that briefly illuminates the entire Park. The sequence will take less than five minutes from start to finish, but, if all goes well, our memory of it should last much longer.

Cai's pyrotechnical breakthrough, which he developed with the assistance of the Grucci fireworks family, on Long Island, is to combine huge numbers of individual firework events into unified, massive forms in the sky. To make the vertical wheel of fire over the Reservoir, which will last for fifteen seconds, Cai and the Gruccis have allocated ten thousand rocket "shells." "By comparison," Cai said last week, "for a typical Fourth of July show by Macy's, which is the largest in this country, they fire about ten thousand shells per minute. Here we have ten thousand shells in fifteen seconds." Cai, whose English is still shaky, even after eight years of living in New York, spoke in Chinese, and Jennifer Wen Ma, the director of the Cai Studio, on Great Jones Street, translated expertly. Given the complexity of the Central Park event, he was asked, was it possible that something might go wrong? "No one can say," Cai said cheerfully. "It is all done by computer. We did many tests, but if there is any electrical problem, like a surge, you cannot go back and physically light ten thousand fuses."

Sitting in his immaculate studio, at one end of a glass-topped table whose top had just been squeegeed and ...