He brought presents for everyone. What did he give you? All talk is of the gifts brought by Albert Men Chi Lai, manager of Ever Need, a professional scaffolding company in Hong Kong, which came to Dublin this week to erect bamboo scaffolding around the old Carlton Cinema on O'Connell Street.
Dan Shipsides, creator of this work of art, the prize-winning Nissan Art Project for the Millennium, got two bamboo stands with carvings for luck and prosperity; Declan McGonagle, director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, got a little bamboo screen decorated with Chinese prayers. Someone got a bird cage, someone else a marble frog.
Could the dramatic pair of white trousers decorated with red hoops on Fiona O'Malley, city councillor and daughter of Des O'Malley, be from Hong Kong?
"They're from a second-hand shop", she says, adding that she's a great believer in recycling. The Progressive Democrat plans to stand in the next Dun Laoghaire Rathdown election. Watch out for those trousers when she comes looking for your vote. Over lunch at the Trinity Suite in the Gresham Hotel, friends and artists discuss matters artistic. Dorothy Walker, a board member of IMMA, is just back from New York where her son, Corban Walker, had an opening of his installation, Mapping 4, in the Pace Gallery in Greene Street. Meanwhile, artist Katie Holten is preparing to fly the other direction, to the Big Apple for the first time for the opening at the Michael Gold Gallery of Plot, a collaboration between herself and fellow artist, Helen O'Leary, created this summer at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh.
Others at the lunch include Stella Coffey of the Artists Association of Ireland; Niall Crowley, chief executive of the Equality Authority and Maretta Dillon, co-director of the Lighthouse Cinema, which closed in 1996. "We've been trying to get a new venue in Dublin," she explains, and there's talk of "a potential association with the Carlton development".