31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit: Various Works (2018-2019)

Overview

Conceived by Kamin Lertchaiprasert, the 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit is an art project and conceptual museum. The museum features objects attached to stories of human empathy in order to foster a community around generosity and compassion, which Lertchaiprasert considers crucial to human life.

Thanks to technological innovation, today’s world is replete with advanced knowledge and enhanced human abilities, often measured in terms of an intelligence quotient (IQ). Unfortunately, material progress has led to a loss of affective connection between people—a low emotional quotient (EQ)—signifying the lack of empathy across our world today. An ideal society would not only comprise material development but also inner peace and spiritual intelligence—a ‘love quotient (LQ)’—requiring an understanding of loving kindness, a virtue true to human nature.

This project invites participation in creating a society in which LQ is an acknowledged and treasured understanding; each one of us is not just a part of society, but actually the whole. Thus, host and guests all share ownership of this project because the 31st Century Museum is, in fact, our collective body or life, our spiritual intelligence, our art. By sharing everyday stories of people coming into contact with loving kindness, through either first-hand experience or second-hand knowledge of events, the project inspires collective ownership and the formation of a collective body, life and spiritual intelligence as art. For LQ to take on a tangible form through shared learning, workshop participants’ stories, with accompanying materials, have been compiled in an e-book as a keepsake.

This project is conceived as a tool-kit—a set of artistic propositions that offer instruction in an alternate methodology for determining Art. It critically engages with the nature of ‘intent’ as a set of socially engaged motivations that have collective value and meaning.

To download the Perception Itself Is Action e-book, please click here.