A cluster of visitors is standing near Michael Landy's giant trash can for unwanted art, (2010), at the opening of the Yokohama Triennale 2014 when Belgian artist Wim Delvoye turns to the group and asks: "Did you see the blowjob guy?"
Delvoye - whose contribution to the exhibition is 15 metres of rusting iron sheet metal cut into Gothic patterns and assembled to look like a semi truck, titled (2007) - is referring to a stubble-faced Japanese man standing nearby. He is a typical , or nerd, and his name is Takumi Ueda.
Ueda is holding a canvas of a crudely drawn cartoon of a woman performing oral sex on a man with an excessively long penis. It looked like bathroom graffiti, and he had painted it about 10 years ago, when he was still a virgin. "I have a very small penis," he says, strangely happy to share this private detail. "I have a [psychological] complex." But he says that even though he is throwing out the drawing, he is keeping the condom from the first time he ever had sex.
Putting things behind us, both as individuals and as a society, is one of the intriguing ideas behind Landy's . Realised in Yokohama for the second time, it is a transparent, 30-square-metre plexiglas cage for artists to toss old works into.
The work sits in the centre of the atrium of the Yokohama Museum of Art and greets all visitors to the Triennale. It is a rather ominous way to open Japan's most important exhibition of contemporary art.
For many in Japan and East Asia, the Yokohama Triennale, which runs to November 3, is a bellwether of the latest ideas in the international art world. Featuring more than 400 works by 79 artists - from contemporaries such as Landy and Delvoye to historical figures like Andy Warhol and Rene Magritte - it is supposed to be a survey of all that is new in the art world. Yet the work is a call to destroy old ideas. Even the exhibition's theme seems a meditation for end-times: "ART Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion."
The theme comes from artistic director Yasumasa Morimura, a star artist known for posing in photos as Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa, Marcel Duchamp and other icons from pop culture and art history. He is represented by top galleries, such as Luhring Augustine in New York, so as the curator he brings star power, but what about ideas?
