Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has an original recipe for success: "I can't paint," he said, "but I can cook."

Tiravanija, 40, co-opts normally staid gallery and museum spaces and turns them into lively social occasions. His exhibitions are often like one long opening reception: Someone, usually the artist himself, is cooking, and people sit around eating, drinking and chatting. The interaction is the artwork.

Tiravanija (pronounced Teer-ah-vah-nit) is in town for a solo show at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai and to host a monthlong series of events in the Asakusa area, sponsored by the Asahi Beer Arts Foundation and Sumida Ward.

The artist gained prominence as one of the leaders of "relational art" -- in which the artwork is completed by audience participation -- by making and distributing curry in New York galleries in the early 1990s. In the process, Tiravanija not only wanted to appeal to the gut instinct of his bohemian, never-miss-a-free-lunch audience but also to bite into the commodification process inherent in the art world.

Tiravanija isn't the first to address this issue. In the '60s and '70s, many Conceptual artists sought to eliminate the art object. To them, the idea was everything, even though it was usually little more than a recipe for an action or a process put down on paper. Tiravanija readily acknowledges ur-Conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and musician John Cage as influences, but two additional artists also help contextualize his work.

In the 1950s, Allan Kaprow organized "Happenings," art events that involved large groups of people acting out Kaprow's loose, chaotic scripts. In 1973, Conceptualist Tom Marioni did his first "Free Beer" exhibition. Throughout the course of the show, the gallery was instructed to keep an ample supply of local beer available to anyone who wished to drink it.

Marioni may have made a lot of friends with his installation, but Tiravanija's free curry helped launch his career. Over the past decade, he has cooked, bicycled and otherwise interacted his way through prestigious, generation-defining group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1999, the Whitney Biennial in 1995, the Skulpturenprojekt Muenster in 1997 and many others.

In addition, Tiravanija has had numerous solo shows at major international museums. For example, in 1996 he set up a sound studio with instruments for visitors to play and record their own music at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997, he designed a children's education and art-making area. Last year, at Portikus in Frankfurt, he installed a replica of his New York apartment where visitors could congregate to sleep, bathe, have a wedding -- do whatever they wanted -- 24 hours a day.

Tiravanija attributes part of his convivial approach to being Thai. "My work reflects the personality of Thai people," he said, "[We are] open, friendly and like to be surrounded by people."

His ready smile may seem typically Thai, but Tiravanija's upbringing wasn't. As the son of a diplomat, Tiravanija was born in Argentina in 1961 and grew up in Ethiopia and Thailand, where his grandmother had a restaurant and TV cooking show. He later traveled to Canada, then America for art school before "settling down" in New York, Bangkok and Berlin.

Though this is Tiravanija's first solo museum show in Japan, it isn't his first visit. As part of a show at Gallery Side 2 in 2000, he cooked his trademark phad thai in a Roppongi restaurant. He participated as a professor in the research program at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu in July 2001. And he took part in last year's Yokohama Triennale, showing videos (and the minivan he drove) from his Fukuoka-to-Yokohama road trip.

Because consumption usually takes a literal form in Tiravanija's work -- e.g., the audience chomps on his noodles and musses up his bed -- the monumental ready-made sculpture he's arranged at the Opera City show seems stiff, formal and uncharacteristically closed. On a huge plywood table stretching nearly the length of the gallery, Tiravanija has laid out a vast feast of plastic display food, instant-noodle packs, bags of chips and cans of beer and soda. You can look, but you can't touch.

It's not still-life, though; the action is elsewhere. For example, on the gallery walls, video monitors show an artisan making a plastic model of Tiravanija's phad thai, complete with the chopsticks suspended in midair. It looks a lot like he's cooking. The actions are very methodical and precise: Wind twine around the noodles to hold them upright; harden them with a blast from a heat gun; arrange the fake shrimp; and so on.

Tiravanija admits that though the video looks like a minor component, he is more interested in the making of the models than in the models themselves. "That's activity," he said. "That's where life is."

The collaborative play of day-to-day existence fascinates Tiravanija. "I'm interested in the everyday and how one puts oneself into it," he said.

This exploration may come out of Western art movements, but it also reflects an Asian sensibility: "In the West, life is based on objects, but I'm trying to do the opposite.

"I focus not on the object, but the life around it."

Context is an important component. The title of the exhibition, "the raw and the cooked," refers to a seminal structuralist text by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

"It's about the conditions of looking at a culture . . . how things become meaningful," said Tiravanija.

Tiravanija was one of the first Thai contemporary artists to be accepted into an elite world largely dominated by Americans and Europeans. He started thinking about his "dislocated identity" in the West while studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The few pieces of Thai traditional art in the museum collection lacked any "feeling" around them, according to the artist.

Tiravanija tried to unluck the vitality frozen inside the art. For his first cooking piece in a New York gallery in 1989, Tiravanija boiled a pot of curry in the gallery for three weeks. No serving, no eating, just curry bubbling all by itself.

"The pot was like a museum display in the center of the show," he said. Tiravanija says that he gave life to the pot -- his own traditional Thai sculpture -- by cooking in it.

Identity and cooking -- the basic ingredients that would resurface in later works -- were on the table. Still, he wasn't satisfied. The piece didn't engage the audience enough. So for his next show, Tiravanija decided to serve the curry, not just cook it. The social element in his work developed naturally when he was late bringing supplies to the opening -- audience members had to help him prepare and pass out the food.

Another aspect of the current Opera City installation is a small sub-gallery in the back with a computer link to Tiravanija's Internet magazine oVER.Channel ( www.superchannel.org ). The Web site is a virtual platform where people can engage in open dialogues on music, fashion, cooking, etc. This "demo station," as he calls it, may lack immediacy, but it is really another kind of pot around which people can gather and "cook" their ideas, albeit remotely.

Tiravanija acknowledges that the Opera City show doesn't look like his typical exhibitions -- he's using plastic food for the first time, and there's no free-for-all component -- but he stresses the importance of playing with his own expectations. Tiravanija sees his work as a set of models that have to be made and then taken apart. With this show, he isn't just refining his recipe -- he's starting from scratch.