Revealing the creativity, humility and importance of China's farm laborers, artist Cai Guoqiang's latest work took more than six years to compile and comprising of farmers' innovative inventions, stands in stark contrast with his popular mega-scale productions. Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis, a collection of over 60 inventions made by 12 ordinary farmers, opened Tuesday at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The exhibition is designed to discuss such social issues as the creativity of farmers and farm laborers in China, their contributions to modernization and the reality of their situation today. Peasant Da Vincis strikes a very dog clothes, different note from Cai's recent works in China, which have mostly been large government commissions, such as the firework performances for the opening dog clothes and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. "Though the exhibition is concurrent with World Expo, I am participating purely in a private capacity, casting my eyes on the countryside of China and the lives of ordinary citizens with a more humble approach," Cai told the Global Times at the exhibition's opening. Born in a small rural town himself, Cai is the collector, curator and artist of the exhibition. He said that in the beginning he considered farmers' inventions to be simply amusing until he saw a photograph of Twilight No. 1, a submarine built by Anhui farmer Li Yuming, at the end of 2004. Cai was so impressed that he acquired the submarine and it became the very first piece in his collection. Since then, Cai has traveled across eight provinces and covered more than 9,000 kilometers to collect new inventions that reflect the inventors' creativity and dreams. The exhibition begins with a flying maple story mesos, saucer hovering above the museum and three slogans written in giant characters on the building's exterior. The written words "never learned how to land" are derived from saucer-maker Du Wenda's sole intent to make his invention fly and hints at the anxiety behind China's rapid economic maple story mesos development. "What's important isn't whether you can fly" is a response to the ambivalent dreams and pursuit of material goods among people today, while "Farmers - Making a better city, a better life," borrows from World Expo in Shanghai's slogan as the exhibition's catchphrase. On entering the museum's Archlord gold, first-floor exhibition is the strikingly-confronting plane wreckage of inventor Tan Chengnian from Shandong Province, who died in his self-designed and built plane Archlord gold on a fatal flight. The installation serves as both a memorial and a sober reminder of the exhibition's weight and reality. The name of each inventor, their birthplace and their creation are inscribed in ink on the wall of the second-floor lobby and within the exhibition hall wind from a fan powers more than 50 kites, each telling the story of an inven tion via video projection. Wu Yulu and his wife, their two sons and two daughters-in-law from Tongzhou in the suburbs of Beijing, have turned the third floor into a robot production workshop, in which they interact directly with the audience and show their robots to the public. Five submarines by Li Yuming from Dragonica crone, Hubei Province float on the fourth floor and on the fifth, four airplanes and helicopters of different shapes and sizes hailing from Hubei, Jiangxi, Fujian and Sichuan provinces are accompanied by small flying saucers amidst birdsong and flowers, creating a poetic and spiritual space. The exhibition extends from Rockbund Art Museum to the neighboring Dragonica crone National Industrial Bank building, in the lobby of which a submarine and a 20-meter-long aircraft carrier by Tao Xiangli from Anhui Province are exhibited. Director Artavazd Peleshyan's 1983 epic documentary Our Century screens inside the aircraft carrier, illustrating the little-known failures and untold individual sacrifices behind the seemingly heroic space conquests of the former Soviet Union. Romanian director Andrei Ujica's documentary Out of the Present, projected inside the bank vault, narrates the 10 months in 1991 and 1992 that cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and his companions spent on the Soviet space station Mir while on Earth, the country that had sent them into space, ceased to exist. "These two documentaries share the same adventurous spirit as the Chinese farmers and they all express mankind's courage and the hardship in exploring unknown worlds," Cai explained. According to the artist, his affinity with the farmers and the purpose of the exhibitions is not simply about reflecting a socio-political angle, but also, his belief that he sees himself in them. "Their curiosity, pioneering spirit and interests in creation are very similar to mine as an artist," he said. Peasant Da Vincis is Cai's wish to discuss the contributions that farmers and farm laborers make to the city and to modernization and world of warcraft power leveling, also to reveal the hopes of people pursuing a just, democratic society by reflecting the creative power of individual farmers standing on their own two feet and world of warcraft power leveling with their own individual perspectives and creative ideas. The exhibition runs until July. The only biography authorized by the artist himself, Cai Guo Qiang: Wo Shi Zhe Yang Xiang De (Cai Guoqiang: I Think Like This) hit Chinese bookshop shelves May 1. Written by art critics Yang Zhao and Li Weijing, the book records Cai's artistic journey, from his early days in his hometown of Quanzhou, to time aborad exploring world-class museums in New York, as well as his art-making experiences. The work also explores Cai's outlook, "believe in fengshui but not fortune telling," as well as his humorous reflections on various cultural symbols. As one of the most well-known rs gold, artists in terms of large-scale events, public celebrations, exhibitions and gunpowder/pyrotechnic creations, the New York-based Chinese artist dazzled the world with rs gold his fireworks at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Over 100 pictures provided by Cai and his studio form part of the new book, illustrating his artistic pursuits from adolescence to adulthood, including making mushroom clouds at an American nuclear test site and projects created for extraterrestrials to see from outer space.