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

so it's fair to give everybody 50 strokes. I tried to borrow this wonderful idea - I think the title itself is a conceptual art work - to question the M iddle Eastern context. I d id it as a show in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. I'm very interested in the conflict and human d ialogue - it's a kind of healing process. But instead of doing something l ike a slogan or first degree I remembered this very famous Buddh ist saying . I spent two weeks conceiving the project and one n ight I couldn't sleep because a group of Arab people were drumming all day and all night in their garden and suddenly I had this sort of 'short circu it' , like an electronic phenomenon . As an artist I cannot do a project involving beating people, and so the idea is to beat the placed objects which people sit on and sleep, so that is where the chairs and the beds come from . I transformed it into a huge drum instrument. All the drumsticks are symbols of violence. There's the police stick and pieces of tables and chairs and so on , so most of the public I th ink understand or receive the message even though through an apparently very joyful, pleased way of playing. This year I showed this piece in the Venice Biennale and I invited three Tibetan monks because I spent three months in this area and I had a strong desire to do something with them , not just making a painting of their image but something involving their spiritual , peaceful ritual culture. I invited three Tibetan monks to drum it as in a ritual ceremony for the opening of the Venice Biennale. The public tried to experiment with the vibration of the people who have just drummed on the other side. It's a kind of healing system . I think this work also gives me a new d irection of working that means how to make the work. The work itself became an invitation with the public - not only a physical touch but when we touch the drum it created the real meaning of the whole work. IMAGE Here you can see a kind of a flesh game and actually this is art work from one of my students at the art school where I taught. The student agreed I would use it with my own interpretation, but in h is work originally he wanted to say this round table or round shape is like territory of art and actually every artist says when we create nice work it was a little bit by chance . We don't know until afterwards what we are doing. Actually he wants to say that this is a kind of game. We try every time with a lot of concentration to put it right in the m iddle, but of course you can never always do the same so I just borrow this picture to interpret or to re-interpret as a multiple culturalism map. Around this picture are all kinds of d ifferent colours, but right in the middle it's a small point but it's a wh ite point. I consider it as a kind of western dominant culture so the multiple cultural ism until now we talk about is a kind of rel ationship that means every non-western artist wants to have d ialogue with the centre, so even though sometimes we organise the big show outside of a western country we still invite a lot of very well known western curators. Finally this table really gave me some ideas. What I want to do in the future is to question this picture and try, with a lot of artists, to decompose this picture. If somebody wants to ask me what is my next project I would l ike to say my next most ambitious project is to try to become a Ch inese traditional doctor in ten years. So try to make an make appointment in ten years if you have a problem . 1 69