Otori Hidenaga, Global Advisory Committee: In this new cultural context, domestic cultural producers—not even counting those who often go abroad and make those sites their primary places of activity—started to gaze beyond their own national borders. It is not difficult to find artists whose creativity is apparently informed by strategies for or against the process of globalization. And even when their work does not appear to show any direct concern for globalization per se, one could say it still represents a gesture of refusal toward it. In either case, the chances that Japanese cultural producers travel abroad to show their work in art exhibitions or in theaters have increased exponentially in recent years, and this phenomenon is very new in Japan’s cultural history.