opportunity for me to undertake research, to travel to parts of the world that I hadn’t visited before, especially those closer to Australia, particularly in South East Asia and Japan, China, and Korea. I included several Japanese artists in the Biennale that I have worked with subsequently, developing long term relationships with some of them, such as On Kawara, Kawamata and Shimabuku who I am showing next year at Ikon – a big survey of his work. So my deepening interest in Japanese art started in 1997 and continues to deepen. It’s interesting to me how much Japanese art appeals to me. As a curator, I want to make exhibitions of work I like, which is not to say that I am not critical, but you know, critical conversation has to be around something one wants to engage with … KW: In 2001, you co-curated the exhibition Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art the single largest show of contemporary Japanese art held in the UK. I recall that the atmosphere of the show was generally quiet and understated, lacking all the ostentation of Japanese Neo- Pop as exemplified by the work of Nara Yoshitomo and Murakami Takashi, who had by that time become internationally known. There seemed a definite intent to not ‘define’ Japan or ‘Japaneseness,’ but instead to present interesting art being made in Japan at that time. Avoiding the narrow selectivity of international representations of Japanese art after 1990, the exhibition gave a more diversified and polyphonic view of contemporary practice at that time. Could you discuss how that exhibition came about, your intentions, ambitions and the