This essay addresses three key moments in the history of Japan's representation at the Venice Biennale: the introduction of "Japanese art" in the early stages of the exposition's development, in the late nineteenth century; Japan's official participation in the postwar Biennale, starting in 1952 and through the end of the 1960s; and the Japanese pavilion's program during the Biennale's so-called experimental period in the decade following the student demonstrations of 1968. While seemingly distinct, these three episodes evince a structural continuity: the demand for and performance of cultural difference within the space of the exhibition. This essay argues that Japan's (self-) representation of cultural alterity was mediated by the idea of pluralism promoted by the exhibition. Such representation was functional to the Biennale's mandate as well as to Japan's shifting world-historical aspirations. In the postwar period, Japanese artists and critics-including some individuals directly involved in the planning of Japan's submissions-came to diagnose what they saw as the limitations of the Biennale-Pavilion system. In doing so, they intuited a fundamental problem with the discourse of world in art as articulated in this exposition. This was, namely, the "pseudo-objectivity" of the international: the discourse of heterogeneity found in the Venice Biennale concealed inequalities based on the power differentials of the hegemonic world-system.
