The Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe has won the 2008 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in visual arts and architecture. Established by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) in 1980, the annual award honors the memory of George Wittenborn (1905–1974), a New York art book dealer and publisher who was a strong supporter of ARLIS/NA. Eligible titles are evaluated in the categories of content, documentation, layout, format, and overall aesthetic quality.

Published on the occasion of a comprehensive exhibition of work by the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang, organized by Thomas Krens and Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim Museum, the book includes essays by Wang Hui, David Joselit, Miwon Kwon, and Sandhini Poddar. Designed by Miko McGinty and Rita Jules, the catalogue features over 230 illustrations and offers a comprehensive history and interpretation of Cai’s art, as well as an extensive chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography.

The award was presented during the annual ARLIS/NA national conference in Indianapolis on Friday, April 17. On naming the Guggenheim publication, the award committee said, "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe" excels in all of the required categories of content, documentation, layout, and format. . . . It provides an outstanding example of the scholarship and design that the award was created to recognize."

Cai Guo-Qiang's early works : 1985–88

Cai Guo-Qiang’s early works in the exhibition date from 1984 to 1988, when he first developed the basic methodology and process of his signature gunpowder drawings and explosions. This selection of early works reveals Cai’s progressive search for a practice of art making that directly harnesses the spontaneity of natural forces. Ultimately, he arrived at an art where these forces allowed him to relinquish control, resulting in compositions formed by the random marks of sparks and smoke.

Cai’s early two-dimensional works on canvas and paper display key themes that would later come to define his conceptual concerns. Among these is his mining of Chinese folklore and mythology, wherein he appropriated popular images, traditional materials (such as gunpowder, a famous Chinese invention that is charged with cultural nationalism), and allegorical stories to specify the meaning of his work.

From the start, Cai sought to connect what he called the “unseen world” to his art, linking it to a metaphysical study of cosmic meridians of energy currents, primordial states of chaos, and the nature of formless matter. Initially, Cai experimented with laying oil paint on the canvas and blasting it with air blown from an electric fan that he held over the surface, shaping the movement of paint with the force of wind, as in Typhoon (1985). In 1984, Cai introduced gunpowder ignited directly on his oil canvases. Cai placed powder and fuses on the surface of the canvas, which he positioned horizontally on the floor. When ignited, first the fuses burned instantly along the cord lines, igniting the gunpowder and creating loud bangs and flashes of fire, which then vanished in clouds of smoke. The result is a textured surface that looks and feels like an explosion—the oil paint on canvas is blackened, charred, and erupted, arrested in a state of being expended in a flash.