In a recent profile of Sam Taylor Wood in the Times, Richard Cook wrote ‘spanning modern decay and classical iconography, Sam Taylor Wood’s art is still a sensation.’

Over the last few weeks you couldn’t open a magazine or newspaper without coming across a proliferation of gushing reviews and profiles of her and her work, coinciding with the significant retrospective that is currently on at the Hayward. Here is an artist that can do no wrong.

But earlier this year, I attended the opening of her smaller and altogether more downbeat exhibition at a gallery in Tokyo.

For the unfamiliar, any function in Japan – formal or informal – looks like a funeral. The men wear dark suits, white shirts and sober ties. The women always dress in black. The conversation is hushed.

In the centre of the gallery, there was a long table, covered with a white cloth, set out with food for the guests. If it wasn’t that the food was limited to rapidly wilting cheese, it might have been a real life rendition of Sam Wood’s photograph The Last Supper Wrecked - her parody of Christ’s Last Supper - where the table is full of fruits, meats and wine over which a topless woman presides as Christ. Was this a deliberate or unwitting parody of a parody? Off in a corner, bad wine was being served but then the low-grade culinary experience is to be expected at any opening in Tokyo. The bottom has fallen out of the contemporary art market, gallery attendances are declining and nobody is buying any work. There is no value investing in expensive hospitality.

The exhibition was called ‘To be or not to be’, the main body of work being five examples of Taylor Wood’s Soliloquy series. They were big pieces that hung well in the space: a large white and high walled cube - a gallery owned by Shiseido, the cosmetic and skincare company.

Sam Taylor Wood was there, with her husband Jay Jopling and young daughter, Angelica. Wearing a silver halo on her head (was this a deliberate continuation of the Wrecked parody?), Angelica sat on the floor, scribbling with green coloured pens on sheets of paper. Jay Jopling reminded me of Bruce Kent: tall, clean cut and wearing a dark suit, white shirt and spectacles in heavy frames. He had a room filling presence whilst Sam Taylor Wood would recede in a crowd. She looked like a suburban harassed Mum, trying to get a belligerent daughter off to school and not at all like the stylish party woman who’s pictures with the likes of Stella McCartney or Elton John are often seen on the pages of Tatler or Vogue.

We were a more prosaic crowd, largely, the same bunch that comes to our own opening parties: Johnnie Walker of course, the doyen of the Japanese art scene, who tells me that the Shiseido Gallery doesn’t like him because he is a white nigger (his description of Jews). Like most Japanese galleries, he confides, they tolerate the presence of guijin but really don’t like having them along. He hasn’t been invited to the after show dinner and when he asks where it is the staff refuse to tell him. That response was typical, Johnnie said. When the Gallery first opened, he sent an expensive congratulatory wreath but as he was guijin, they didn’t display it with the rest but put it out by the toilet.

(Nonetheless, we both attend the dinner - at Kihachi, a pleasant but ordinary Italian restaurant in the Ginza).

Benjamin Lee, the Tokyo based photographer was accompanied by an unusually tall young Japanese girl, some thirty years his junior. She was wearing an uplift bra that was working at its maximum: her breasts were on the verge of exploding out of her low cut top. I was introduced to her, and immediately she showed me a trick where she induced a plastic figurine, lying prone on her hand, to rise and stand upright. This provoked a series of comments from the spellbound men about how they wish she could do the same thing to them. I learnt that she had spent time in Canada and her spoken English was unusually good. This she tells me, has led to people believing that she could be a Chinese actress from Hong Kong. The link was lost on me so I asked her why. Because I can speak English, she replied. Later she showed me another trick, where she made a cigarette disappear. I’m impressed and ask if she is a magician. No, she works in an S&M club. Her parents don’t like it she continues. She lives at home with them and they object when she hangs her leather G-string out to dry on the balcony. They fear for what the neighbours are saying.

Very few artists are at the party and there are no A-list celebrities. Indeed, it’s not a big party at all. Maybe 100 in all show up. Araki, the feted Japanese contemporary photographer made a brief and late appearance, accompanied by a pretty young girl wearing a richly decorated kimono. She can’t do tricks though. He had brought his camera and took pictures of Sam Taylor Wood’s daughter, laughing and smiling as he did so. His hair was waxed and had been pinched in to a series of little tufts that stick out at odd angles – his trademark look.

In the Japan Time’s review of the opening, Monty diPietro wrote “she [Sam Wood] kept watching, growing more and more agitated. ‘What’s wrong’ I finally asked. ‘It’s my daughter’ came the nervous reply. ’Araki has got her cornered.” To understand Sam’s reticence I should explain that Araki is the artist who photographed his own daughter naked and, at the Hayward last year, exhibited a photomontage that included explicit photographs of couples having sex.

In turn, I take a photograph of Araki clasped tightly to an English girl with his tongue rammed down her throat. That’s one way of greeting someone I suppose.

Breadman - one of my favourite artists - was there. Tatsumi Orimoto is famed for his performances, travelling the world, appearing in public with loaves of bread tied to his head. It sounds ridiculous but it is wonderfully absurd and involving. He also collaborates with his increasingly senile mother. She is the subject of many photographs and whilst this might appear heartless - as if he is exploiting her illness and funny little presence – in fact he looks after her, cooks her dinner most nights and is devoted to her well being.

He was clutching examples of his work packed in three plastic shopping bags. To anyone seeing him - dressed in a pair of scuffed black adidas training pants, three layers of old t-shirts and a shabby coat - he would have looked like one of Tokyo’s homeless instead of one of Japan’s most gifted and original artists.

I was ignored by Nanjo-san - Japan’s foremost curator. I had upset him when giving a lecture at the Tate where I had, without identifying him, criticised some behaviour of his. Another curator, the Englishman, David Elliot also avoids talking at length to me but then I had told him that I didn’t like his employers very much, so I could hardly be surprised. However, his assistant, Takahashi-san wants to meet with me again.

As is usual at openings, the guests largely ignored the work on the walls. I saw Araki spend a few minutes studying it he was in the minority. Mostly the guests talked among themselves about anything but art.

The curator was Waldemar Januszczak. He was an earnest fellow dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt, a rather strange affectation for someone who was, to put it politely, rather portly. At dinner he made a gushing speech which was in contrast to Sam Taylor Wood’s rather terse, ‘Thank you for coming, sorry but my daughter is tired and needs to go to bed, and I hope I can persuade my husband to do the same.’ I thought the latter comment was a sly joke but wasn’t sure.

Over dinner, I told her that when I was last in London she was due to speak at the Tate on the day I flew out and I was disappointed to have missed it. She replied that she rarely does such speeches and was filled with terror beforehand but she thought it went well. We had two things in common: we both attended Goldsmiths, and both knew the actor Ray Winston. (Well to clarify. I once had a drink with Ray, twenty years ago in a West End drinking club). I asked her why she had used him in one of the Soliloquies. She replied blandly that he was an interesting character. In an essay on her work she says her intention was to present a figure that might be seen as either God or the Devil. It looked to me like Ray Winston, sitting in a steam room, smoking a cigarette with a towel wrapped round his middle. I was mystified. In fact, I was disillusioned by the work although I didn’t tell her this. The photograph Bound Ram - what I had thought previously was an extremely poignant picture of a ram, with its feet bound, waiting to be slaughtered in a Marrakech market - now looked just a piece of good opportunism. Many tourists had probably photographed it that day. Was it no more than a lucky snap, which was then given retrospective meaning? I say that because the Soliloquy series seems totally without anything important to say. Each piece is one large single photograph, sitting on top of a narrow panel of three further photographs, which in some way are connected to the main picture. It is a scheme derived from Renaissance altarpieces - a narrow frieze or predella has a series of paintings, which are both a continuation and a reflection upon the main image.

The point was, I thought her work ‘far from being psychologically charged, in which the thoughts of the sitters are tortuous, and almost audible’ (to quote from the catalogue) lacked real emotion, was strained and clichéd. They were stage-managed compositions. I’m afraid it was very much a ‘so what’ reaction. Everything was laboured. I know she has battled bravely with cancer and that her themes reflect her life or death struggle. But why such obvious allusions? Even the title of the show, ‘To be or not to be’ seemed heavy-handed. If she is attempting to illuminate the Big Question – the meaning of life and death – this is being done with little deftness.

The show was organised by the Shiseido Corporate Culture Department. Perhaps the whole affair was summed up by a request made of me by Nishimura-san the new Manager of the Gallery. He had recently been put in the job, having spent the last 18 years or so working as an in-house TV producer for Shiseido. I know nothing about culture or art he confided to me. Can we go out for a drink and will you help me learn he asked?

I said I would so he ordered a special bottle of red wine. Special, he said, because there was cheap wine for some of the dinner guests, and more expensive ones for his table.

I should be so lucky. So, at the end of dinner I collected the corks and put them in a paper bag, which I labelled ‘Wine corks from a dinner with Sam Taylor Wood.’ Look out for them at my next show.

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