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128 Panel 3brushes, a small painting of a blond woman with atooth brush, are concrete and tangible, but despitehaving the objects as proof, the stories flow without afull stop. Nindityo’s works do not tell us when to moveon to the next story. It is a cabinet that allows forcuriosity, if not a sense of voyeurism. (Photo 7)I have placed Navin Rawanchaikul last because while Iwas in Thailand, I witnessed one of his biggest artprojects which took place in his home town of ChiangMai. One of the key artists in Thailand, if not theregion, Rawanchaikul’s art had from the verybeginning involved community participation. His“Navin Gallery Bangkok” (Photo 8) had a taxiinstalled with art and objects. The taxi travelledaround the city like a normal taxi picking uppassengers. Other versions were done in Sydney,London, Bonn and New York. 26 The exhibition in thetaxi would be changed each week. His practice hassince been centered around the act of bridging localsystems with that of global trends. 27 His project withFukuoka Asian Art Museum in 1998 involvedworking with schoolchildren and local people. Hiswork in December 2010 was a public interventionentitled Mahakad (Photo 8, 9, 10) which involved theChiang Mai’s Warorot market (known locally as KadLuang) a market almost as dizzying as Chatuchak inBangkok. Rawanchaikul chose the market, a centralfeature of Chiang Mai, having grown up in his family’sfabric store in Kad Luang. This massive interventioninvolved interviews with the locals of the market’smulti-cultural community. It is to Rawanchaikul’scredit that this site-specific work elaborated not onlythe lives of present-day market vendors (who gavetheir oral histories on video), but also re-establishedconnections to the history of the place.Rawanchaikul’s use of local histories and formats fromwhich to anchor global forms of exchange, frees himfrom being pulled into accepted norms within theinternational art scene. The critique of the spectacleand issue of exoticism can be leveled against hispractice. But as this project was situated in his owncity, self-reflexivity comes into play. Rawanchaikul issituated, and the event’s context untranslatable.Un-crating Collections and the Transit of IdeasIt has been said that art works that enter museums gothere to die. In a sense, there is some truth to this asmuseums tend to freeze the artworks. As a repository,the museum keeps and cares for the objects inperpetuity. The objects are cared for by experts andconservators, housed in particular storages andhandled with gloves. Each object must remain in thesame state, as much as possible, the way they werereceived. In this way, objects are treated withpermanence, so much so that all acts done upon it willpermeate through to the future.Any work of art always exists within a context; andwhile there are possible and even allowable universalinterpretations, art is always made in specificcircumstances and purposes. Meaning can be drawnfrom each object, but the crux of this paper focuses onthe myriads of ways. It may seem like a relativistnotion, interpretations whirl around every object, suchthat “questions can be formulated, and answers soughtin ways very different from the procedures developedin western tradition”. 28 Indeed, art works once drawninto a collection and also once presented in a displayallow for meanings to emerge. However, the reading ofmeanings cannot pivot around an object mercilesslysuch that the object is rendered catatonic. Certainideological contexts can be taken, and depending onwhat one chooses, most especially with conceptualcross-cultural borrowing, each position must be heldinto account for establishing the art objects’ validity.In Ushiroshoji Masahiro’s text, he gives us a glimpseinto the collections via FAAM’s exhibition display.Plainly speaking, exhibitions like these are skewedtowards works that are seen as jewels of the collection.Thus the 2007 exhibition “Asia Collection 70: Fromthe Collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum”,highlights works from either seminal artists likeAmanda Heng and Tang Da Wu from Singapore oriconic works like Thai artist Montien Boonma’s Alm(the work and artist are key in the region) (Photo 11)or Carcass-Cornucopia by Filipina artist AgnesArellano (Photo 12) Indeed, FAAM’s collection needsunearthing to reveal the trajectories that certain artistsand their works have opened to allow for other worksto follow, and other discourses, even those inopposition to theirs.“Henry Moore said,”sculpture is like a journey”. In asense, visiting a museum and viewing its collection alsoresembles a journey. // The journey through that landknown as the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM)must be a little eccentric and yet a fresh experience.Unlike well-known tourist destinations, there is noadequate map, there are no guidebooks prepared andthere are no signposts to be found. The travelers who visitthis place may begin to question their own values andartistic standards. When they begin this questioningThe Work of the 2010/2011 API Fellows