About the Symposium

The Making of Japanese Art History in the 20th Century is an international symposium hosted at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS), Heidelberg University, Germany, on September 3–4, 2026.

In recent decades, the "institutional turn" (seidoron) in Japanese art history and museum studies has critically reshaped disciplinary self-understanding in both Japanese and English scholarships. "Japan" itself has increasingly been questioned as a stable or sufficient framework for interpreting artistic production and its histories.

The symposium provides a venue to reflect on how the discipline's epistemic frameworks, exclusions, and transnational entanglements were shaped — often outside, alongside, or prior to formal institutional consolidation. We welcome critical self-inspection of the discursive formation of Japanese art history from the Meiji period to 1989.