The good citizens of Liverpool in Britain woke up one morning a few years ago to find that one of the city's monuments had disappeared behind what looked like a giant garden shed.
Somebody had built a hotel room around the five-metre statue of Queen Victoria: the monarch stood on a plinth inside, overlooking not an empire on which the sun never set, but an en suite bathroom and a red-carpeted room. The visual gag was topped off with a sign informing visitors that they could 'sleep with the queen'. Victoria, presumably, was not amused.
The man who pulled off that stunt was Japanese artist Tatsuro Bashi, alias Tatzu Nishi. One critic dubbed his contribution to the 2002 Liverpool Biennale a 'surreal displacement' that demonstrated the 'blurring of public and private space within contemporary capitalism'. Others probably thought it was belittling to the late queen of the realm.
Nishi, 47, thought it was funny. 'It wasn't political at all,' he says at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, which will unveil his latest project this month. 'I hate political art. I want people to laugh.' In pursuit of that goal, Nishi has taken over public spaces from Cologne (his home since 1987) to Los Angeles, constructing rooms and houses around street lights, monuments and whatever else he finds around the place. Usually he pulls it off, but the Nagoya-born artist says it can be touch and go.
'My projects are very large and involve famous objects in the middle of public spaces, so the reaction before each show is usually about 50-50. Half of the people think, 'Who is this guy and why is he making fun of our queen or whatever?' But once they see the exhibit they usually come on board - usually.'
One project that provoked more reaction than most was his attempt to enclose a well-known Chinatown monument in Yokohama two years ago. 'That was rough,' he says.