He once shat on camera. For no apparent reason. The camera zooms from his arse to his face, but the defecating artist remains silent.

Despite, or because of, his turd-obsession, Vasan is the current darling of the Asian media--Thailand's very own court jester with a conscience. In a country where television and radio programs can be forced off the air by the military, Vasan's dare-devil antics are out of the ordinary. He was once condemned by 43 separate Buddhist institutions for portraying the Lord Buddha returning to a 20th-century Thailand populated by masturbating monks playing Nintendo games. If it's not his paintings that are causing a furor, it's his public demonstrations. Bound, gagged and blindfolded, he writhed around on a busy Bangkok pavement in a recent street performance called Kill Me Now. The accompanying dialogue ran like this: "To live in the fucking city, can be nothing, speak nothing, can go nowhere. Can not accept: please kill me now."

This month he is flaunting his dissidence at the Japan Foundation Forum in an exhibition entitled Asian Modernism, which brings together past and present artists from Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Eleven Vasan pieces have been chosen to represent the contemporary Thai art scene. All of them come from I Love Thai Culture, Vasan's most controversial exhibition to date, which lets rip on all his favorite sociological themes.

"Thai society," spits the artist, "is composed of slaves. In a slave society, you lick your boss's arsehole, and he will reward you. This is how Thai people get through life." He diligently satirizes the earnest attempts of the government to promote traditional dance, dress and crafts. Instead of the Thailand of the Thai Airways posters--The Land Of Smiles--Vasan displays a painting entitled The Land of the Fixed Grin.

"They want an easy life," explains Vasan. "They don't like asking too many questions for fear they might get answers." Thus the artist produces 108 Questions for the Thai People, a series of questions scribbled on individual scraps of paper. Among them, translated into Vasan's cheerfully ungrammatical English, are: "Do your fart smell good?", "Do Thailand be democracy?", "Do you love grandfather mafia?", "Do you most like rice or pizza?", "What method you use to masturbate?" and "Why I ask you?"

The exhibition didn't remain intact after Bangkok's National Gallery got their hands on it. Four pieces were banned: they, and a few of the more scabrous items, will not be on view in Tokyo. Pieces like Thai Political Culture: It's for Swallowing People, for instance, which depicts hungry politicians sitting around a table and feasting on human genitalia. Pieces like the sketch Monument to Thai Prostitutes--a vast, temple-like structure housing a pair of quivering and wide-open thighs. And pieces like Modern Cock, which depicts sycophantic Thai teenagers licking a giant star-spangled penis (Vasan-speak for "Go home, Ronald McDonald").

In Tokyo, there will be only 106 of the 108 Questions. "Do you want to do away with the military?" was banned in Bangkok, a consequence of the army's regular and occasionally bloody interventions in Thai politics. And, by some mysterious censorship process, the Japanese authorities have shed one more: "Do you think to raping your mother?" The Tourism Authority of Thailand is another paranoid presence, if less threatening than the army; hence the final banned piece, Thai Traveler Culture. Above plush red velvet curtains hangs a sign saying, "Idiot's [sic] are not allowed." Draw the curtains and you come face-to-fanny with another splay-legged prostitute. "Welcome to Thailand," says the sign.

Asian Modernism--Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand is at the Kokusai Koryu Forum until 12/3.