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

When I arrived in America in 1 995 an,d moved to New York it was a time when China was being perceived and constructed as a great threat to America's future peace and stability, and at the time I found many newspapers, magazines and the media generally representing China as some sort of fearful, revenant dragon and so this of course had a great influence on the way that I approached this rather old symbol . And of course because of my being in America, the sense I had of my own position and the sense of cultural conflict and struggle compared to the time when I was in Japan was much stronger. Added to th is were a number of other factors, including my own inability to speak English and also the fact that my aud iences in America were at a distance philosophically, emotionally and also territorially - physically at a d istance from the aud iences that I'd been negotiating with and engaged with in Japan and China, so this influenced the way that I continued my work. There were some obvious changes and additions to the concepts, issues as well as materials that I dealt with in my work, such as issues related to East-West negotiation and cultural clash and exchange and so on . This is a work that I d id for the Ven ice B iennale while still in Japan yet already thinking about the relationsh ip with the non-Asian , with the West. I took a Chinese junk down the Grand Canal in Ven ice . The work is called Bring to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot. During the exhibition the junk was outside. Inside I used a Coke machine that dispensed bottled Chinese medicines. In Japan and China I 'd been using dynamite and other materials to create certain effects. In America my fascination turned to creating mushroom clouds and atom bomb explosions. Though using Chinese materials, the types of th ings I began to investigate were somewhat more complex. This was a jacuzzi of the races, of the nations. People of different nationalities or different racial types, so-called, were surrounded by a number of Chinese taihusu - limestone rocks, famous for their organic beauty - dredged out of Lake Tai in Jiangsu Province. The particular situation in America of course is that anybody who wanted to get into the jacuzzi had to sign an agreement saying that they took all personal responsibility for any health risks or other matters related to their involvement in the jacuzzi performance. In Japan however the same work takes on a d ifferent aspect entirely and I designed the same work outside in nature, in the type of environment that one relates to Japanese philosophical thought. And of course due to the nature of Japanese bathing, both in trad itional terms and in contemporary Japanese life, nobody had to sign any contracts . A work that in America had a particular type of environment and meaning in the Japanese environment took on a different, one could say more poetic, aspect and the issue of race and contestation, melting pot and non-melting pot disappears in the Japanese environment. I was not interested in trying to emphasise subjectively what type of belief I had in terms of race, content, contestation, oppositionality but rather allow the environment to d ictate where the work unfolded . This is a dragon I created in America out of blown-up sheepskins. This is a work using coracles in Mongolia and Tibet. River crossings were carried out With people in blown-up sheepskins and cowskins. I've used these sheepskins to create a huge Chinese ark and to that I attached Toyota motors that would rumble and represent the invasion - Ghengis Khan's revenge, the ark's revenge, the return of the Mongol hordes. And that's when I came to be completely fascinated with dragons. This is a dragon kite, but in Japan the idea of creating a kite is far more abstract and more suited to the Japanese environment in which I was working. This is a dragon that I created with lssey M iyake, and th is is again more of an aesthetic type of dragon rather than a threatening one. This is a huge boat made with arrows in New York wh ich has a long literary tale behind it. This is the most recent work that I have created for the Venice Biennale. It was a sculpture involving performance art as well . I can d iscuss its background and its relationship to both Chinese traditional history and contemporary Communist Party h istory during question time. 78