IN SAMUEL FOSSO'S self-portrait, The Chief Who Sold Africa to the Colonists, the Cameroon-born photographer gazes imperiously from a leopard-skin chair, drenched in gold and flanked at his feet by baubles of western comfort: a useless pair of a leather shoes and a shopping bag. The unsettling mixture of cultural signifiers is completed by what appear to be a pair of 3-D glasses perched on his nose. It's not hard to understand why it was chosen as one of the signature pieces of the Africa Remix exhibition at the Mori Art Museum: defiant, sardonic and not in the least bit grateful for the attentions of a western audience. The photograph screams, 'Show me some respect!' Fosso recently told a British newspaper that he wanted to say to westerners: 'Look, we had our own democracy before you came, we had our own rulers, our own presidents. But it was our ruler that you came and got rid of, and in his place, you set up your hierarchies, your systems.' While clearly a polemicist, Fosso's concerns for Africa take a back seat to his favourite subject: himself. By his own admission he's narcissistic, and has spent decades taking photos to preserve his looks for his grandchildren. 'When I look at myself in the mirror, the only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait.' These tensions between context, geography and individuality are woven through this, the largest exhibition of African art ever shown in Asia: works by 84 men and women from 25 countries, often reluctantly carrying the cultural baggage of their troubled continent, but also determined to escape the confines of that loaded term: the African artist. 'What's important is to discover the diversity of Africa,' says chief curator Simon Njami. 'The media and the news makes everything look the same - the 'heart of darkness' and all the rest of it - but there are as many Africas as there are Africans. The artist is, first of all, an individual who translates his own unique nightmares. The first thing to look at is the work.' Rather than try to pin down an entire continent, Njami and Mori director David Elliott say they have simply opted for what they call a 'frozen moment in time', putting some of the best of contemporary African art before western and now Asian audiences in an attempt to reddress a lopsided cultural relationship. 'Africa has always been read,' says Njami. 'And has never given its point of view.' The idea, according to the Mori's Edan Corkill, is to give the artists a leg up into the rarified global art market. 'There are a lot of great artists in Africa, but they don't have the means to be seen by others,' says Corkill. 'They need a framework and this is it. An exhibition of this kind has to be done once, but only once.' As expected, the result is such a sprawling eclectic collection of photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, film and video that it's difficult to know where to start. Probably the best place is Ghanaian El Anatsui's striking eight-metre 'cloth of gold', which dominates the exhibition's entrance. From a distance, it looks like a religious tapestry, but closer inspection reveals that it's made from thousands of bottle tops: a pleasing mixture of the sacred and the profane, as well as a remarkable exercise in junkyard art. Inside, Guy Tillim's photograph of shoeless children in tattered shirts is, while heartbreaking, one of several pieces described as 'dreary cliche' by some reviewers. There's nothing cliched about Wangechi Mutu's startling collages, which use stock images from the media to create disjointed and unsettling portraits of Modern African women. There's lots of edgy humour, too. Great American Nude 2002 by Hassan Musa, showing a naked Osama bin Laden lying with his bottom high in the air on a cloth of miniature stars and stripes and motorbikes, would have had Andy Warhol laughing his blond wig off. And he might even have managed a smile at Kenyan Richard Onyango's The Prey, showing a huge half-naked woman squatting over a scrawny man on a bed. Despite the knockabout eclecticism, however, there's a strong, consistent attempt to engage with contemporary political and cultural issues. In the installation piece Obstacles, for instance, Tangiers-born Mounir Fatmi takes an image of a bearded and ragged Saddam Hussein after his capture by US forces. Juxtaposed with the legend: 'My father has lost all his teeth, I can bite him now', the piece seems to explore the role of the father figure in Muslim cultures. 'It's time to bite the father, to change and look for another way,' says the 36-year-old Paris-based artist, who says he's delighted to take part. 'What we see here is fragments of Africa, not the whole place. Hopefully, it will help people see the place in a different way.' The exhibition has already toured several European galleries, including the Hayward in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it bowled over most critics, although Britain's Brian Sewell described it a 'wretched assembly of post tribal artifacts' with the 'air of a state-run trade fair'. 'Africa is the curator's graveyard,' writes Elliott in the exhibition's introduction - a vast continent that 'has dwarfed any attempt to contain it'. The message here seems to be: whatever you think you know about African art, think again. Africa Remix, Mori Art Museum, Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, 1,500 yen ($100). For details, go to www.mori.art.museum/eng . Ends Aug 31