then the bubble burst and various manifestations of Japanese culture – even Japanese tourists! – were no longer so much in evidence in the wider world. Meanwhile, in China, the policies of Deng Xiaoping started to take effect, and the rest is an extraordinary ongoing story, not the same as Japan’s. Japan had a very strong relationship with America in a way that was distinctively different from what is going on with China. China is huge. The correspondence between the Chinese and Russian art worlds is sort of more pertinent. In a way, the “Fuck Off” exhibition in China (2000), Neo-pop strategies and cathartic performance art are reminiscent of what went on in Russia during the 1980s and 90s. There has been a kind of violence in Chinese work that is likewise to do with wanting to escape the shackles of a totalitarian regime. KW: If we go back a little to our discussion on the unique situations of Japan and China, and the development of 20th-century Japanese art then we should highlight its extremely vibrant avant-garde movements; its pre-war Futurist, Dada, Constructivist and Surrealist phases (artist groups such as Mavo in the 1920s, for instance), Arte Povera, neo-Dada, Fluxus / Tokyo Fluxus and art radicalised by the social tumult of the 1960s (Mono-ha, Hi Red Centre, Gutai, Kyushu-ha), Performance and Conceptualism (as exemplified by expatriate artists famous outside Japan, such as Yoko Ono or On Kawara) and ‘bubble era’ Postmodernist cultural critique (Dumb Type, for instance). Currently, in Japan, the work by collectives such as Command N and young emerging artists Ichiro Endo and Chim↑Pom, explore performance,