Hasta La Ideas

A few years ago a Japanese variety show pitted three Olympic fencers versus 50
average fencers—all at the same time, Chinese-Connection-style, to see what would
happen.

Any of you who saw that must surely have wondered: How can I apply
those odds to ping pong? Well, wonder no more: Singaporean artist Lee Wen has the solution.

Conceived of way back in 1998 for an art performance in Australia, Wen’s “Ping-Pong Go
Round” was created as an interactive art installation.

Alas, it was not actually designed to allow many players to battle one or two stuck
in the middle, but rather to give players “a different perception of the
limitations” of the normally linear, dialogue-like game, in order to
provide players with “new possibilities of a broader dialogue,” in
Lee’s words.

In 2012 the Singapore Art Museum invited Lee to revisit the project and offered to
sponsor two versions: The first was his original six-meter-diameter table,
located outdoors, while the second was a scaled-down version that shared space
alongside other exhibitions inside the museum proper. “At first I was not
too happy to present the smaller one as it was scaled down,” Lee writes.
“But as it turns out the smaller table had its advantages, as [one
viewer] observed the smaller one is more intimate where players have to hit
the ball with more care, just like a more considered speech at the
international meetings or conferences of globalization and diverse societies
and countries of multi-culturalism.”

Last year Lee was again invited to break out the table, this time at Art Basel Hong
Kong. Call me shallow, but that being HK, there’s another Lee I would have
loved to see in the middle of this thing.

Via Neatorama