specific ideas behind your choice of artists who were represented in the exhibition? JW: It was the Japan Festival. The reason why I was asked to do that was that I’d recently arrived back in the UK and reconnected with the Hayward, people who I knew there who were looking around for a curator to do a show for the Japan Festival that had been booked in some years previously. They accepted my proposal, developed out of the proposition of my Biennale in Sydney, that focused on everyday reality rather than Japanese postmodern weirdness. KW: Yes. I didn’t see the biennale in Sydney, but I read a lot about it and then looking back at the exhibition I saw at Hayward, I could see such continuity. JW: Basically, what I was doing was taking the same basic argument and applying it to one particular corner of the art world. I was not so interested in art about art, or artists obsessed by their artistic identity; neither were those artists whose practise is centred on their national identity. Another thing perhaps is that I was coming from a place still quite obsessed with the YBA phenomenon. There was a kind of nationalism in the air here that I was resisting. KW: Similarly the Tate triennial exhibition, where, as with the exhibition at Hayward, you also took a different curatorial approach in your avoiding the more obvious names prevalent at that time such YBA artists like Sara Lucas.