Text as Narration: Exhibition Texts and Regimes of Art in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

This paper examines exhibition texts in contemporary Japanese museums as narrative devices that organize conditions of viewing. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible and his three regimes of art (ethical, representative/poetic, aesthetic), it analyzes how curatorial language positions viewers and structures relations to artworks. Situating exhibition texts within Japan’s Meiji-era reception and translation of Western art institutions and the concept of bijutsu, it presents five case studies of major exhibitions (2019–2025). The analyses show that exhibition texts function not as neutral supplements but as apparatuses that alternately frame works normatively, stabilize art-historical orders, or open indeterminate spaces of perception, often overlapping within a single exhibition.