BELGIUM'S contribution to next year's Hong Kong Arts Festival is an installation work titled The Fifth Force, by innovative, avant garde Antwerp artist Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven. She is a part-time art teacher at the Royal Academy of Ghent and founder of Club Moral, which promotes alternative 'extreme art' worldwide. She will be exhibiting what she described as 'the melting pot of all the elements I have been working with over the past 20 years'. Her mysterious work will be exhibited from February 16 to March 5 at the Arts Centre's Pao Galleries. She said: 'My starting point was to make a cult-space in which different and complementary moral survival systems are present. 'This presence is such . . . that on whatever moment one enters the room, he or she captures a kind of ethical, total image of what determines us, Westerners, wittingly or unwittingly, in most of our behaviour and thoughts. 'I call it a mystical work because my main purpose is to cancel out oppositions, to re-unite what has been pulled apart since the dawn of humanity.' An extensive subject, obviously, although Van Kerckhoven has never shied-away from ambitious projects. The Club Moral she founded has evolved into an international, alternative art circuit, supported by a magazine called Force Mental . She has also been attached to the Laboratory of Free Intelligence at the Free University in Brussels and exhibited in Europe, America and Australia. Besides drawing, painting and creating installations, she makes video films, computer-related works and has published a book titled Paradogma. The Fifth Force, however, is by no means complete. 'This is a work in progress,' she said. 'It evolves each time I show it. It refines and becomes more complete and clearer.' The installation, which she described as a 'momentary materialised train of thought,' had previously been exhibited in Europe, Australia and the United States. 'My life is my art,' van Kerckhoven added. 'I regard these installations as surviving mechanisms - always the result of definite period of research in the imagery as well as in the linguistic environment of the time I live in.'
