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

small boats that were made. I wanted to avoid at all costs a flame that was red or bright yellow. To create that type of flame is very easy by just filling up each vessel to the brim with alcohol or a su itable mixture of alcohol and spirits and that burns a bright yel low. I wanted a blue effect, therefore I had to change the composition of the materials I was using. The big problem I had was I put alcohol on top of a layer of water, but to achieve the small but particular blue flame that I wanted to achieve I had to reduce the amount of alcohol to about 35-40%, and that meant the flame was easily extingu ished . And of course I and my friends here at the gallery had long discussions about the exact composition of the final solution, I demanding my right to try and maintain the blue-ness of that flame. Everyone in the gallery involved with this creation knew that this would create the problem of trying to keep the flame going. I was determined to have the flame light but blue, and so in the end I took the responsibility of reducing the amount of alcohol to the lowest possible level. I real ise of cou rse that the artist's situation compared to that of a gallery or an organisation involved in supporting an artist's work is quite different. I can feel as free as a bird . I create my work, I fly off as I wish, free-wheeling and uninh ibited . However the gallery itself is not like a bird but rather an airport where you have to have controls, you have to have supervision , you have to have a method of making sure that each plane that takes off works - it fl ies and it stays up in the air. I just flit off as I wish. So that's why I'm faced with the very confused and saddening situation of having created a work that wasn't real ised , that put the Gallery in a situation where so many people came to watch the blue river dragon, yet because it wasn't realised so many people were disappointed . Not only were there problems on that n ight but I 'm sure there'll be many ramifications in the future for which I feel deeply regretfu l . And of course I'd l ike to take this opportunity to publicly apologise to all of you for both the failure of the realisation of that work but also for having you all standing out there in the cold for so long. Now I 'd like to go back and give a brief retrospective of the last few years of my work, looking at some of the work I've done in Japan and in America to give you a better idea of the scope of the ideas I 've been trying to battle with and negotiate over these years . Because of the natural and very strong cultural and ph ilosophical l inks between China and Japan, many of my works in Japan reflect and play on and investigate issues related to nature and the philosophy shared over the seas between Japan and China. Many of these works are fairly abstract. This is a work in which I tried to represent the abstract destruction of the universe, or the big bang at the beginn ing of the un iverse. 1 This is a work that I created in Hiroshima which of course we all know from the d isastrous atom bomb explosion in 1 945. In this work I tried to play on the horror of those issues while at the same time maintaining a sense of distance and abstraction . This is a work that I created at the furthest end of the Great Wall of China. The building you can see is the last point of the Great Wall and I decided to create an extension to the Great Wall of China in fire. This is another work that I created in Japan , and I excavated a ship which had sunk from the sea . At the time in Japan there was a great fascination with sea-bound cultures, and so I got lots of people to come along and help dig out a boat from the sand itself. This is the boat I created inside the art gallery in Japan . This is the remains of the boat we found when we were digging . Outside the gallery itself, we used the remains of this ancient boat to create a number of pagoda-like structures . Those three pagodas were reconstructed as one large boat/wooden pagoda. This is the same work with the pagoda turned on its side at the Ven ice Biennale a few years later with Chinese flags bedecking it. With the red streaming out of the back and the light inside it looks like either a dragon flying off into the sky or a type of missile proj ectile being shot into the heavens. Sometimes using the same types of materials but moving geographically into d ifferent spaces myself, I have transformed these works into studies of d ifferent aspects of the same type of material I'm interested in. 77