The Politics of Curating Japonisme

Abstract

This article studies the Paris exposition Japonismes 2018, organized by the Japanese government to introduce the European public to the profundity of Japanese culture. It examines the organizational deliberations leading up to the exposition; the curation of individual exhibits held within its ambit; and the cultural politics of ‘Japan expositions’ that began with Japonismes and continue to this day. It argues that the organizers and exhibits in Japonismes make political use of the trope of a timeless, mystical, and animistic Japanese sense of beauty that supposedly unites prehistoric pottery and contemporary comics and animation. This Japanese aesthetic vision claims to provide an alternative to Western norms, thereby promising to resolve contemporary problems, such as anthropocentrism, by influencing Western aesthetics as it had in the late nineteenth century. Japonismes exemplifies how Japanese soft power diplomacy can employ Western tropes about Japan, such as Japonisme, for its economic and nation-branding efforts.