JW: Yes, exactly. I have always have been interested in something slightly quieter, or a little less obvious or less theatrical. At the same time, it is important that one sort of mixes things up, at least to keep the attention of one’s audience. I didn’t want to go down the “Superflat" road. It was playing on a kind of exoticism, often very much with foreign markets in mind. I wanted to tell an alternative story, falling in with Oscar Wilde’s proposition, which is that Japan is very ordinary place rather than spinning a story of weirdness that previous exhibitions had done. For example, the particularities, or peculiarities, of Japan were very much the focus of “Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties”, the show that Thomas Sokolowski did with Kathy Halbreich in the US. KW: In retrospect, the Japanese art scene in the early to mid-1990s was not so dissimilar to that of present-day China. It was at the beginning of its boom within the international art market, with numerous curators and art dealers visiting Japan searching for young art stars. Over the last 10 years Chinese and Korean contemporary art has taken centre stage on the international art market and as such played a major role in defining the ‘contemporary’ through their increasingly powerful and extremely vibrant arts scene. Mami Kataoka has previously spoken of how in Japan, where the market, collectors, audience – everything, is small in scale, even Tokyo, which is widely held to be the epicentre of the Japanese art world, cannot hold a candle to the art scenes of New York or London. The majority of Japanese collectors seemingly tend to buy Western rather than Japanese art and Tokyo, which was at the forefront of the Asian art world only a short time ago