Through an analysis of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 series (1990, 1993, 2000), this Major Research Project (MRP) offers a revisionary definition of tradition that includes the practice of re-inventing, re-framing, and re-enacting traditionally transmitted beliefs, practices, and objects to fit within the needs and desires of a given society. I look specifically at how Cai re-interprets and re-invents the innate physical and aesthetic properties of gunpowder as a dynamic resource to re-construct and re-enact traditional practices, such as Chinese landscape painting and the literati’s self-cultivation practices, in a contemporary art context. I consider Cai’s use of gunpowder as a mode of engaging with tradition to overcome the lingering effects of colonization, which have suppressed, displaced, and misrepresented tradition as an obsession or fixation to preserve the past.