Championing the 'rights of things'

IN 1917, a 20th-century artist, Marcel Duchamp, laid a standard urinal flat on its back and called it "Fountain". His provocative move is said to be the invention of conceptual art, and one of its readings was that art was something you p***ed on. Seventy-seven years later, in 1994, two artists relieved themselves on a replica of Duchamp's Fountain in order to "restore" the urinal to its right function.

From there, Chinese artist Wu Shanzhuan and his collaborator, Inga Svala Thorsdottir from Iceland, developed their signature Things Rights, patterned after the Human Rights Charter, which contains 30 articles about the rights of things.

Wu, 54, is one of the leading figures of the 1980's pre-Tiananmen Square generation of Chinese Conceptualists, and Inga Svala Thorsdottir, 48, started Thor's Daughter Pulverizing Ser…