Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Chinese coins are bronze, so I wanted to combine and m _ ake a confrontation between these two smells. Of course this language was too direct and the project was censored the day before the opening . So I realised this original version in South Korea in the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago. I MAGE This is a piece I real ised in the United States in Deitch Projects which is called Daily incantation. Actually I am a city boy - I was born in Shanghai and I l ive in Paris and I spend a lot of time now in Europe, so when I did my first show in a commercial gallery in New York I wanted to do something with the idea of city. The Chinese chamberpots here - about 1 00 chamberpots - are a kind of witness and victim about the urban change of a city like Shanghai, wh ich is becoming very westernised of course. So it's a kind of d isappearing object. I have a memory of the sound of washing chamberpots in Shanghai streets when I was in Shanghai for secondary school . Every day I passed through the street going to school and people were washing the chamberpots, and at school we had to read the Red Book of Mao, so it's a kind of daily incantation . I tried to combine these experiences with high technology today. In the piece there is a sound system which is a m ixture between the washing sound and human voice which is political discourse superimposed and the shape comes from a very famous Chinese old musical instrument which is called Bian Zhong. I MAGE This is a project I d id for P.S . 1 in New York and the piece is called Prayer wheel : money makes the mare go. The location was the basement of P . S . 1 right in the m iddle of the build ing, that means up near the roof which was the main entrance. I tried to make a turning piece and everyone passed through and it turned like a wheel . The wheel shape came from a Tibetan area and I should say just before arriving in Paris I was very sick so I felt that I should pass some time in the Tibetan area, not because it is far from Shanghai or exotic or a cultural phenomenon but I think for a kind of a research, a seeking for something but I don't know what. I th ink when you see my last project you can understand. I MAGE This is a piece I d id for 'Cities on the Move'. I think this is a very unusual and innovative show because the curators tried to put all Asia's contemporary a rt through the city - that means actually without a city urban context it is very difficult for us to talk about contemporary Asian art. What I was doing was trying to find material relating to the idea of city and the physical city. I tied about 1 OOO inflated bicycle inner tubes and combined them with about 5000 toy cars after seeing a very political and economically ambitious slogan in China when I came back to Shanghai one day that China wanted to become one of the most important automobile producers in the world in the twenty-first century. You can imagine with one billion people if all the fam ilies had a car - the world would turn in a reverse way, probably. I wanted to make a critical and ironical comment on this ambition so the piece was called Precipitous parturition and it's about how to get a baby - actually the part getting the baby is not a small bicycle, it's all the small cars. I MAGE This is a work I realised with close collaboration with a New York-based Jamaican black artist, Nari Ward . This is also a reflection about 'transexperience', to have an opportunity to collaborate with a different artist. Instead of doing something in wh ich we could represent our own culture from yellow, black and so on we decided to do something wh ich is a kind of 'interfection' wh ich is the title of the piece. We put 'ter' in between infection - a kind of infection between us so in the space we built two parts. My part comprised plastic paper and 1 500 IV bags because at that moment I was very sick in hospital. On the other side is his part - he decomposed a lot of mattresses into something very poetic, a little bit dirty, a very dynamic part like two flowing energies in space, a kind of aquarium in this kind of maritime museum in Stockholm . I put some Chinese medicine into the IV bag so it's a fish trap wh ich tries to catch energy. I MAGE This project is called Fifty strokes to each which is a very famous Buddh ist maxim which says there's no one side who has more reason than another side among the conflicts and disputes, 1 68