Gallery Speak For, located in Tokyo's Daikanyama district, is decidedly not like other galleries.

Instead of developing particular themes for different shows, Speak For has taken up the inspirational mandate of using one year-long theme for all exhibitions held (they usually run about a month).

Newly opened a year ago, Speak For adopted the theme of "reality" for 1999. This year their theme of "irregular" looks at the flip side of reality, to reconstruct a more complete representation of contemporary life.

This exhibition, on display until April 23, heralds a potent mix of paintings by two young Japanese artists, Yayoi Deki and Yutanpo Shirane, and photographs by two international stars, Serge Leblon from Paris and Toyin from England.

This small group show hangs well together, which on initial appraisal would seem unlikely: The work and the artists could not be more divergent. In this disparity, though, is the connection.

Koji Yoshida, curator of the gallery exhibitions, is also a magazine editor and as such wants Speak For to have a similar immediacy, but in three dimensions.

"I want to make the gallery project like the magazine process -- speedy and spontaneous, and visually similar to the rapid turning of the magazine pages," he explained at the buzzing opening in the white, long, low-ceilinged gallery space.

"For example," he said, "until the last moment I was not sure which artists to include in this show. But looking at the end result it seems that the differences between the Japanese artists and the foreign photographers and the separateness in the depiction of inner and outer sensibility is quite apparent, and for me it is an interesting mix."

Deki's paintings (included in the recent Mito showcase of young Japanese artists) are packed with tiny images from the outpourings of her imaginary world. The paintings teem with millions of minute faces and creatures endlessly flowing in and out of the void to construct a larger form in the shape of a fish or woman, reminiscent of William Blake's mystical drawings.

The hinted narratives apparent in the other three artists' work are completely internal in Deki's psychedelic paintings. In one of her works, they even seem to spill out onto the floor with sculptures of small painted creatures clustering at the base.

Deki is fast gaining a reputation as the new Yayoi Kusama and her inspired vision is fired by a similarly gifted and neurotic intensity, clearly observable in the obsessive repetitive detail that makes up the body of her oeuvre.

Hanging alongside Deki's art are the paintings of Shirane, who works primarily as an illustrator. They are loosely connected in a series, which includes an imp, Amazonian women and a boy with a camera, recurring in a number of the highly charged Pop Art and manga-influenced paintings laden with psychosexual overtones. The paintings, however, are rendered in a cool, detached manner and appear to be telling only part of the story, offering glimpses of a larger plot that has a slightly sinister aspect.

Toyin's photographs also have a similar studied cool, but are simple portraits of beautiful young things placed in quite ordinary interiors, but who appear to be somehow floating and disconnected from their environment.

These are very painterly portraits, stripped of all unnecessary detail, but with something unstable in each cool look at the camera. The subjects are uncannily self-contained and appear eternally removed from any direct field of action, isolated within the photographic frame, forever to do nothing but peer out onto an unseen world.

Serge Leblon, on the other hand, constructs studied dramas -- each photograph captures a glimpse into part of the action, not unlike a film still, where the main protagonist is bathed in a sharp focus that quickly bleeds into a wider pool of fuzziness, like the world seen close up, through the eyes of a myopic.

The woman sitting on the bench is stalking a figure of a man out of the range of focus. Leblon inverts the usual scenarios to provoke a reaction in the viewer -- playing with the ability of images to convey a tale of sorts, with a twist in the plot to subvert an expected sense of the usual. The last photograph in Leblon's series eschews human subjects altogether and instead places a miniature doll at the center of action in a realistically constructed set.

Gallery Speak For is not attempting the role of an ordinary gallery, with typical exhibition constraints to make the parts into a whole, but rather to establish a space where current art practice has the opportunity for immediate exposure. To help generate a cultural ferment in Tokyo, a city not noted as a seething and supportive art environment like London or New York, is Yoshida's aim, and judging by this show, he is on target.