WORLD BEAT

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Walking into Asian Field, a sculptural installation work by English sculptor Antony Gormley is as much a sensory experience as it is an intellectual one.

With 40,000 small, hand-made clay figurines filling the room, the air is filled with a raw, earthy smell, bringing back memories of childhood pleasures, while the sea of eyes gazing up gives the feeling that the art work is looking back at you. The artist describes it as 'a room full of earth that's been made conscious'.

As when facing a vast open seascape and looking at waves rising and falling, it's easy to get lost for a moment and plunge into a reverie as your eyes pass over the sea of dark eye holes.

Asian Field is part of a series of installations made with communities around the world. The sculptor (best-known for Angel of the North, an enormous outdoor sculpture in England) has been working on the project on and off since 1989. He won the Turner Prize in 1994 for a similar project in Britain.

The first Field project started out with only 150 figures made by Gormley and his assistants. Since then, he's delegated the work of making the figures. Now, locals are asked to follow a few instructions: the pieces have to be hand-sized with deep eyes, they must stand-up on their own and the head has to be in proportion with the body.

'It took me six years to realise that the best thing to do was work with other people and hand over the responsibility for the form of the work,' Gormley says. 'That was a very difficult thing to realise.'