GERMANY:Germany's leading art show, Documenta, has opened in Kassel with its most unusual work ever: an "installation" of 1,001 living, breathing Chinese tourists.
But is it art? Visitors to the 12th Documenta, founded in 1955 and held every five years, have until September to reach their verdict on the work by avant-garde Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei.
He calls his work Fairytale, a tribute to Kassel's most famous sons, the Brothers Grimm. The €3 million project, which he terms "art as field study", began as a casting call on his blog last February.
Within three days, enough people had applied and filled in a questionnaire for the "fairytale" three-month trip to Germany. "The origin of Fairytale is that I hoped to find a way to bring China's current social condition to Kassel and allow westerners to view a sample of modern Chinese society," said Ai on his blog.
"We don't know how the locals will react to this sudden 'eastern wave' but we're interested to find out."
The visitors - teachers, policemen, students, engineers and farmers - are being housed in a specially built dormitory and have no commitments or tasks in Kassel. The only restriction is that they cannot leave the city, levelled almost entirely in the second World War and rebuilt in the 1950s.
Chinese art is the focal point of Documenta and another eye-catching work, a protest against the destruction of old Beijing, comes from artist Lu Hao.
On two 50m-long scrolls he has painted Beijing's Chang'an Avenue as it was, with traditional Chinese buildings, and as it is now, with gleaming, generic office blocks.
"The unique character of my city is getting lost," he said. "Cities are becoming all the same."
Ireland is represented by James Coleman from Ballaghaderreen and his film installation Retake with Evidence with Harvey Keitel.
Documenta artistic director Roger Buergel calls this year's show "the fillet steak of the art world". "I don't want meaningless art from opportunists who create a work overnight and who've been doing the same thing for years," he said.
So far, the show has had a decidedly mixed reception. "The miracle of each Documenta is supposed to be its ability to thrill the masses without succumbing to their tastes; reconciling this contradiction is more challenging than ever in 2007," said Der Spiegel tactfully.