'Freja: Explosion Event For Faurschou Foundation', realized on-site outside Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 6 2012. Photo by Wen-You Cai, courtesy Faurschou Foundation Cai Studio

Cai Guo-Qiang started making art for extraterrestrials in 1989. Five months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he built a shanty similar to those made by Tiananmen protestors, loaded it with gunpowder and lit a fuse. The nine-second-long explosion was his artwork: a pyrotechnic spectacle visible from space that for once wasn’t a byproduct of violence. If any aliens saw it, they didn’t say, but it made little difference. His Project for Extraterrestrials No. 1 had plenty of resonance for terrestrial audiences confronted with the futility of improving the intergalactic image of the bloody human race.

Cai’s career – currently surveyed at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen – was built on that gesture together with several dozen more ambitious projects for extraterrestrials. To orchestrate his 1993 Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, for example, he and some assistants suspended approximately six miles of fuse in the Gobi desert, beginning where the Great Wall ended. For approximately fifteen minutes, a 10,000-meter barricade of fire was sustained with 1300 pounds of gunpowder. By 2008, Cai’s command of pyrotechnics had become so sophisticated that he was commissioned by the Chinese government to create fireworks displays for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. No extraterrestrials were invited, which was probably for the best, since they might have wondered what the artist who’d introduced them to Tiananmen was doing engineering the most ostentatious global propaganda display in the history of the People’s Republic.

Like many Chinese artists, Cai is pragmatic. Even Ai Weiwei, arguably the world’s most prominent Chinese dissident, has had his share of patronage from the Chinese state. (He was the artistic consultant on the Bird’s Nest Stadium in which Cai’s Olympic firework displays were presented.) Yet unlike Ai’s pragmatism – which is an honorable if perilous political tactic – Cai’s pragmatism has been purely professional. It’s the kind of pragmatism that the Chinese government can fully abide, and maybe even relish: When Cai shows work in Western venues that obliquely criticizes the PRC, he only burnishes China’s global image as a tolerant country unjustly vilified by critics like Ai.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Cai’s work has become increasingly innocuous as his fame has increased. As a prelude to his Faurschou Foundation exhibit, for instance, he fired thousands of small rockets from a traditional Danish boat. If desperate, you could extract meaning from this action – as the curators have done by calling it “a conversation between the seen and unseen worlds” – or you can simply be seduced by the sculptural beauty of the scorched wooden hull now suspended from the ceiling of an immaculate gallery.

Either way, Cai’s pragmatism will have paid off for him. His career continues to advance. (This year he also had big shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Zhejiang Art Museum in Hangzhou.) He must be proud. He’s getting exactly what he wants. But what does it say about the art circuit that uncritically embraces his work? Rest assured, he’s lost whatever credibility he once had with aliens.