This interview was conducted by Arata Sasaki on September 18, 2008, and was published on the online magazine Hitspaper on December 15, 2008. The English translation was made by Reona Ueda. Special thanks to Marian Faux and Marta Pachucka.

Hitspaper : まず上田さんについて教えてください。日本で手に入いる情報があまりにも少ないもので…
Reona Ueda : そうですか(笑) ニューヨークから戻ってきて、まだ１ヶ月しか経ってませんし、活動の中心もずっとニューヨークでした。向こうに行ったのが9.11の数ヶ月後だったので、７年くらいになるのかな。僕の肩書きは、ファインアートの分野で活動しているアーティストです。

Hitspaper : Could you tell us about yourself first? We found very little information about you in Japan…
Reona Ueda : I see (laughs). It has only been a month since I came back from New York, where I was based for quite a while. I moved there a few months after 9.11, so I guess it has been seven years. I am a fine artist.

The following text is part of my contribution to Newwork Magazine No.2 published in June 2008.

It is a generally accepted view that pervasive skepticism underlies postmodern society, and this widespread skeptical mentality may lead to having even paranoid habits of doubt. If that is true, this climate naturally influences how critics judge artworks. The introduction to the feature “Future Greats: 30 Art Stars of Tomorrow” in Art Review’s March 2008 issue admits these worries, uncertainties, and anxieties that the critics have about their own judgments and the lack of tangible criteria in today’s contemporary art:

1. “Future Greats: 30 Art Stars of Tomorrow”, ArtReview, no.20, London, March 2008: p.79

“What’s ‘great’?”, [the panel of experts who selected the list of artists] asked, sighing and rolling their eyes skywards. The thing is that everyone has a different opinion, even if, when we print those opinions on nice paper in a nice font, they look more like facts. And that’s where the worry starts…What’s important to remember is that being on this [Future Greats] list is not a cast-iron guarantee of greatness; it’s a statement of someone’s belief. The belief of the person making the art being matched by the belief of a critic or writer that they are doing something worthwhile…[T]he artworld does function very much on belief.¹

In many cases an artwork is a reflection or a representation of personal belief. Each person may have her own belief, and it is difficult to find a sharable belief that everyone can relate to. This is the age of accelerating modernization and globalization. The common grounds and belief systems that used to be shared before, such as religions, traditions, communities, and institutions, are no longer so trusted and they are being fragmented. Instead, people’s values are formed by a number of easily interchangeable variables like interests, trends, and “lifestyles,” which quickly and randomly cross a society. Therefore it has become difficult for any kind of value judgments to be made with any set of fixed criteria.