At sunset on December 11, 2009, before a freezing crowd and hundreds of commuters passing by, Cai Guo-Qiang ignited a fifty-foot-tall flower made from a gunpowder fuse that he had suspended on the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s columned facade. With a swarm of bright explosions, then a minute of sparklers streaming and smoking in the wind (while flames rose from tar paper protecting the sandstone steps, and men sprinted up with extinguishers), followed by a few deafening booms, Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project, 2009, provided a moment of communal distraction—and a surprisingly poetic rumination