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TJORN, Sweden - The message may be spelled out in white prehistoric bones, but the quest is eternal:

"When Will You Be Happy."

The compelling 100-foot-long installation was created this year by Indian artist Jitish Kallat at a sculpture garden about 300 miles west of Stockholm. Sculpture at Pilane, as it's called, is set on an ancient burial ground featuring 90 "judgment circles" that date back to the middle Iron Age (0-600 A.D.).

When the inland ice melted here 10,000 years ago, Pilane became an island of its own. It's now part of the much larger isle of Tjorn and has been inhabited continuously since the Stone Age. This ancient landscape became the setting for contemporary art only four years ago.

The 20-acre sculpture garden on state property is maintained and curated by Peter Lennby, a former Swedish television documentarian/producer who has a nearby farm. Think Bill Kurtis of Sweden.

Lennby's black-and-white border collie, Ric, follows him around the outdoor museum and his 50 sheep graze among violets, cudweed and wildflowers. Lennby prefers to think of Pilane as a "sculpture landscape," rather than a garden or park.

The sculptures change annually. Besides Kallat's work, there are 24 others, including the bronze "Weeping Girls" from British artist Laura Ford and Icelandic sculptor Steinunn Thorarinsdottir's aluminum/cast-iron human figures that look like neutered Avatars. Another piece is from Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Ursula von Rydingsvard. It's a 14-foot-tall polyurethane resin bonnet-shaped vessel, "Damski Czepek," a popular wedding site when it was in Madison Square Park in New York.

During my visit to Pilane earlier this month, I saw children, regional tourists and a group of floral design students from Tokyo wandering around.

The burial grounds were full of life.

And everyone was happy.

Artist Kallat understood the drama of installing "When Will You Be Happy" on a burial site. "It reminds you that you cannot postpone life," said Kallat, 36.

Lennby was smiling on a cool August morning. Cottonball clouds rolled across a sky of blue velvet. Ric was counseling the sheep.

"People have lived here for 10,000 years," said Lennby, who is "over 60" years old. "We combined the remnants of past civilizations with contemporary art. It is emerging art and nature, and sometimes it is hard to see what is the art and what is the nature."

For example, Ford's lightly colored bronze "Weeping Girls" camouflage into the trees. Visitors climb a mountain peak to see "Sprung," made of pinewood and willow tree branches by Swedish artist Leo Pettersson. There is a dramatic view of the archipelago and the fortress on Marstrand in the distance. "On the clearest of days, you can see lighthouses of Denmark," Lennby said, as I wobbled around the mountain top.

Thorarinsdottir's life-size figures mirror each other around ancient graves.

"The graves are the most visible remnants from old times," he said. "The judgment circles are 2,000 years old. It's important to remember this is not a graveyard as we know it today. It is a meeting place. Anthropologists believe people sat in a circle and decided if someone committed a crime, things like that." Judgment circles have an odd number of stones, ensuring there never would be a tie vote.

The Swedish National Heritage Board's website says the graves could have been used for sacrifices and court sessions. Linguistic students believe that these circles gave rise to the saying to "swear on one's mother's or father's grave."

Lennby said the idea is "to use an old meeting place for meetings of today - meetings of people from all over the world."

Lennby selects the artwork himself. There is no advisory committee. Or influential corporate sponsors.

"I want to reach the broad public," he said. "It's important not to make exhibitions only for art-going people.

"I try to work with all the possibilities of the landscape; the scale, if something blends in or sticks out," he added.

He said that "Pilane," roughly translated, is an extinct tree that was used to make baskets.

Pilane has no tour guides - unless you find Lennby. You can't rent interpretative headsets. No one is carrying cell phones. You just wander around happily in the cool breeze of west Sweden.

I bumped into the 15 Japanese floral women near a large black cube by Swedish artist Jonas Holmquist. An open door leads inside the box, where you'll find what is supposed to resemble the wirings of the human brain.

The women oohed and aahed when I told them I visited Tokyo in 2000 to see the Cubs.

Jabriele Kubo, their German tour guide who now lives in Japan, found out about Pilane three years ago, while visiting friends with a summer house in Sweden.

"This is an amazing experience, to walk up hill, down hill and see art as opposed to a museum where everything is so steady," she said. "Here you can touch things. You can touch the sheep. You hike and eat blueberries. Somehow you get tired in museums. Here you can change your input."

I like how that sounds.

Kubo walked away with her students carrying a handful of green stems from the scirpus plant. She was smiling.

Lennby is amicably divorced and has two grown children who help him run the sculpture garden, which is funded mostly by admission fees and partly by the state. His daughter Frieda runs a coffee shop on the farm.

I asked Lennby if he was happy.

He laughed and answered, "I'm thinking of new projects all the time. Next year, we'll bring a 3-ton sculpture to the top of the mountain. We'll have to build a road."

The hefty bronze and stainless steel totem is by British artist Tony Cragg, who recently was commissioned to make a piece for the Louvre in Paris. The Pilane piece is called "Point of View."

"It's on my farm now," Lennby said. "We will bring it up on a tractor and have a crane carry it up. I'm more exhausted than happy."

Ric patiently waited for his master to open the wooden gate of a weathered fence. Lennby walked around the grounds at a measured pace.

He was content, and sometimes you have to travel this far to see that.

Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored by tourism bureaus for West Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg.