You worked on the “Hong Kong Project” for three years in the early 1990s. Have you returned to Asia? Have you developed new projects about the continent?

I have produced an extensive body of work in Japan, where I have been represented for a long time by Kenji Taki, who has galleries in Tokyo and Nagoya. My most recent project in Asia is a memorial I created for the victims of the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the tsunami that followed. It was an immense tragedy that led to almost 20,000 fatalities. As I write, almost 100,000 people are still without homes, five years after the tragedy! My project was titled Umashimenkana (2013), after a poem by Sadako Kurihara (1913–2005), an extraordinary poet and antinuclear activist who died a decade ago. Back in 1945, she was living in Hiroshima when the nuclear bomb fell on the city, but she survived. That same evening she assisted a neighbor who gave birth to a baby and later wrote this magnificent poem about the need to bring forth new life even in the face of immeasurable tragedy. In this work I pay homage to her and to a dozen children who died in their school in Ishinomaki during the 2011 disaster. Sadly, they were misinformed about safety protocols by their teacher and perished when the tsunami hit their school. I created a memorial using the blackboards I found in the destroyed school. I calculated that these blackboards had received 15,000 hours of the children’s gazes. I thought that they contained all their dreams.

I have also worked in South Korea, where I created a public intervention about famine in North Korea (Jae Gong Ham, 2000). The international media only focuses on Pyongyang every time its dictator Kim Jong-un makes a crazy pronouncement or launches a missile to make some noise. But they shamefully ignore the fact that between two and three million people in North Korea have died of hunger in the last decade. It is a well-known fact that the North Korean people, in total despair, would feed themselves with grass and soap. My project raised some USD 20,000, an amount that, in North Korean terms, is equivalent to approximately USD 200,000 worth of spending power. We transferred the funds to two pasta factories managed by an international nongovernment organization. South Koreans who donated were incredibly generous; they were so grateful to be able to assist their northern neighbors.

Sadly, as you know, a new boat people crisis has been developing in the last few years. I am thinking of Burma’s 1.3 million Rohingya, whose plight every country in Southeast Asia seems to ignore. This has become a spiraling humanitarian crisis for this stateless Muslim minority who are fleeing a brutal persecution in Burma by the military and extremist mobs. I observe this tragedy with a sad sense of déjà vu. I do not think I have the stomach to take this new crisis on.

You are one of very few artists outside of Asia with such an extensive body of work on the continent. What is it that attracts you about Asian cultures or societies?

I have deep admiration for a group of Japanese artists from the 1960s, like On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Jiro Takamatsu, Atsuko Tanaka, Jiro Yoshihara and Genpei Akasegawa. I have collected their work for years. I even lectured last year on On Kawara at the occasion of his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. I also follow closely developments in contemporary Japanese architecture: I am a big fan of Kazuo Sejima, Shigeru Ban and Toyo Ito, to name just a few. Every time I visit Japan I reserve a day or two exclusively to see their newest works. This passion for Japanese culture moved me to study Japanese for a while, but I did not get very far, most regrettably.

I am also a great reader of Japanese poetry, particularly haiku. In fact, I use the haiku model as an inspiration for my works. I am always trying to be as efficient as a haiku with each work I create—to express the maximum with the minimum. Whenever editing a work to its bare essence, I am always thinking of the haiku. The economy of means in a great haiku gives me vertigo. And I aspire to that model.

But, as you know, for me context is everything. When invited to work in these countries in Asia, I am naturally compelled to react to what I feel are the most important issues of the time, and sadly, they were often tragedies. So I reacted to these tragedies and they became the focus of most of my Asian projects.

The installation Lament of the Images (2002) is one of your most memorable works, not only because it was a milestone piece at Documenta 11 in 2002 but also because it echoes previous elements of your works on iconoclasm—there are no images that could narrate a tragedy. It was also made at a moment when we were entering a new century of overproduction of virtual images. Could you tell us about this piece?

I created Lament of the Images right after I finished working on “The Rwanda Project” (1994–2000), which became my longest project to date and without doubt the most difficult. A million people had been killed in less than a hundred days, in the face of the criminal indifference of the so-called world community. I had visited Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Zaire in August of 1994 as the killings were ending. This was the third genocide of the previous century and I wanted to witness the aftermath. I developed some 25 different projects in a period of six years. They all failed miserably. I was confronted with the impossibility of representing an immeasurable tragedy like a genocide. But I kept going. How do you make work out of information that most people would rather ignore? Each one of these 25 projects became an attempt to answer that question. They became exercises in representation. I discovered that reality cannot be represented; artists can only create new realities. But there exists an enormous gap between the two. I never agreed with Adorno when he suggested that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I was much more attracted to Paul Celan’s position, insisting that, on the contrary, poetry after Auschwitz was more necessary than ever. “Suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream,” he wrote. But I also concede that, as Adrienne Rich wrote, “Tonight no poetry will serve.” It is not an indictment against poetry, but instead it suggests that poetry will serve most of the time, but it must be allowed to fail. And in the case of Rwanda, it had to fail.

The Rwandan experience triggered a radical change in my work, essentially regarding my use of images. In a way, a sensation of distrust invaded me. I was not exactly sure if my images’ lack of affect was a symptom of an indifferent society, or if they were innately incapable of effecting change.

Lament of the Images is an expression of all my deep uncertainties—the existential impasse I was facing at that time. It was an attempt to “let there be light,” to offer a radical blinding experience that would help us see better. The white screen contains every doubt, but also, strangely enough, every hope I had left in me.