Tracey Emin opens up ahead of her Hong Kong debut

Tracey Emin's art is so famously confessional, so wincingly personal, that actually interviewing her seems slightly redundant. What is there to say? Everything's already out there - the bed, the tent stitched with names of sleeping partners, the (many) depictions of masturbation, the rape, the abortions. Nothing feels hidden: her entrance into the Great British Consciousness is generally agreed to have been the occasion in 1997 when she appeared, noisily drunk, on a live television show to discuss that year's Turner Prize, which had just been awarded to Gillian Wearing. (Wearing's work was titled 60 Minutes Silence; this aural irony was not lost on viewers.)

Emin later wrote a piece about that night titled "My Booze Heaven". It starts with Wearing (or Wobbly, as Emin, who likes nicknames, calls her) ringing the morning after to say, with commendable generosity, that the highlight of her evening was Emin's performance. Emin, having no memory of the event, thinks this is a hilarious wind-up until she reads about her behaviour in The Guardian newspaper. The account, contained in her 2005 autobiography, Strangeland, is - like much of that book - vivid, funny, poignant. In another essay, titled "New Year in July", she imagines herself as a proud mother with the hangover from hell: "I'd be phoning round every friend, every bar, and asking the same question, 'Oh hi, Tracey here. Yes, Tracey Emin. This is a little embarrassing but I don't suppose I left my baby at your place last night?'"

She's now 52, she rarely drinks and she doesn't have children. Anyone who's seen - or read the transcript of - her 2001 video, Conversation with My Mum, will know that her mother, Pamela Cashin, spent decades worrying about her daughter's fertility. "Because I think you're one of those people in life that don't need children around you," Cashin explains. "I wouldn't see it as a joy for you … I've gone through the years absolutely hoping that you'd never get pregnant." Cashin herself, having got pregnant by a Turkish-Cypriot married man, had booked in for an abortion and only at the last minute decided to keep the baby. She'd no idea she was carrying two - Tracey and her brother, Paul. (The conversation is sufficiently raw that you find yourself nodding when Cashin comments, at one point, "Actually, this is terrible, I hope nobody listens to this"; but it turns out she's concerned people will be able to calculate her age.)

Perhaps the twin experience, as she's lived it, has contributed to a sense that Emin is having an ongoing conversation with someone within herself. She and her brother spoke their own language until they were five and shared a room until they were 12. Strangeland conveys their claustrophobic dependency; there's an extraordinary scene, straight out of Jane Eyre, in which Paul sets their joint childhood bed alight, as well as hints of sexual exploration and violence. Later, when he goes to prison - for fraud - she writes him "long, mad letters" that go unanswered: "But I didn't mind, it was like I was writing for the both of us."

As a result, she seems to have grown up with an internal landscape simultaneously policed by a good cop and a bad cop. In The Interview, a video she did in 1999, the year My Bed was nominated for the Turner Prize, she sneers at herself: "I think your whole existence is a lie because I think you're evading the truth." In her 2001 video The Bailiff, Tracey 1 yells menacingly at a Tracey 2 trapped inside a locked wardrobe: "I think you understand what fear is. I think you know exactly what fear is …"