Through the opening party crowd ran Sam Taylor-Wood's adorable little daughter, Angelica, done up in a fairy costume with a papier-ma^che star floating above her head and a magic wand in her hand. It was a delightful moment that sent a ripple of good old warm-hearted smiles through the well-attended reception for Taylor-Wood's photography exhibition, "To Be or Not to Be," which is now at Ginza's Shiseido Gallery.

Taylor-Wood and I were chatting, when, suddenly, a look of concern crossed the 34-year-old English artist's face. She was watching something across the room -- and she kept on 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."

Indeed, Nobuyoshi Araki -- the lubricious lensman with a penchant for terribly young models, nudes in wire bondage and female degradation in general -- was hovering uncomfortably close to Taylor-Wood's daughter. We quickly walked over and I, half-jokingly, put myself between Araki and Angelica. "Your mother is one of the world's best contemporary artists," I whispered to the little girl. "You shouldn't be hanging around with riffraff like this."

After taking the opportunity to inform Araki that a photograph of me in his new book "Futatabi Shashin" was both taken and used without my permission (Him: "But you look good in the picture"; Me: "My lawyer will call your lawyer," again, only half-joking), it was back to Taylor-Wood and her work. The best of it happened to be hanging right where we were, in the larger of the Shiseido Gallery's two big rooms.

These are C-type color prints, each more than two meters across, from Taylor-Wood's "Soliloquy" series. (Hence the show's title, "To Be or Not to Be," spoken by Hamlet in what must be the world's most famous soliloquy.) These pictures, some of which appear at first glance to be candid shots, are all carefully staged -- an effective and now popular method of crafting moments that was pioneered by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. As with much of Taylor-Wood's work, the atmosphere being built in the pictures is often one of tension, of "what's going to happen next?"

In "Soliloquy I," a formal study, Taylor-Wood uses an actor to re-create, in a contemporary context, a painting called "The Death of Chatterton" by the 19th-century British artist Henry Wallis. A strip underneath the main image contains the 360-degree photographs that Taylor-Wood used in her well-received, mid-1990s series "Five Revolutionary Seconds." Here, the parallel images work to bring an atmosphere that is open to interpretation -- could the man be not dying but rather dreaming the scene below? This the viewer is left to decide.

Taylor-Wood incorporates the same panoramic strip under each of the five large photographs in this show, in a compositional technique reminiscent of the predella that first appeared under Italian paintings from the 12th century.

The most obvious citation of earlier artworks is the piece "Wrecked," a 1996 re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." Here, a naked woman substitutes for Christ, with the rest of the characters looking as though they were attending one of American painter Julian Schnabel's dinner parties -- which is to say, like a happening bunch of young intellectuals and postmodern boozers.

I told Taylor-Wood that, frankly, I found the piece mocking, and that the real "Last Supper," a fresco I was fortunate enough to view in Milan last year, had brought tears to my eyes. She said she was similarly affected when she saw the original, but that her work, although based on da Vinci's, was meant to be something "totally different." This I didn't understand, exactly, and I was just going to ask her to elaborate when Araki moved in on Angelica.

Three recent prints, male nudes that look very much like Robert Mapplethorpe's except that they are gold-tinged instead of silver (these a little weak, I thought), just manage to round out "To Be or Not to Be" -- a must-see show on Tokyo's young 2002 exhibition calendar.