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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes Isozaki Arata’s 1978 exhibition MA as a curatorial and semiotic construction of the in-between, rather than a traditional essence. It argues that the show shaped modern understandings of ma and traces its afterlives in contemporary discourse and transcultural curatorial practice.

Paper long abstract

"MA: Espace, Temps au Japon," the exhibition curated by Isozaki Arata in Paris in 1978, played a decisive role in constructing and globalizing the modern understanding of ma 間, commonly translated as “in-between.” Rather than presenting ma as a stable aesthetic essence rooted in Japanese tradition, the exhibition assembled a constellation of heterogeneous materials, including performance, photography, architectural reconstructions and ritual objects. Through this curatorial orchestration, ma emerged as a perceptual and conceptual experience that visitors could inhabit, negotiate and interpret across cultural boundaries.

Isozaki’s intervention can be understood within his broader intellectual formation shaped by engagements with semiotics, rhetoric and the problem of untranslatability, as well as by his dialogue with Roland Barthes and the Parisian intellectual milieu of the 1970s. These contexts illuminate how ma was translated into a semiotic field, prompting reflection on the limits of language and the operations of analogy, metaphor and interval.

To situate the exhibition within a wider discursive landscape, the study traces several modern genealogies of ma that developed in parallel. While national-cultural interpretations of the 1970s/1980s contributed to ma’s image as a marker of Japanese specificity, other philosophical, architectural and cross-cultural approaches reveal the concept’s multiplicity. Drawing on Michael Lucken’s historiographical framework, this paper demonstrates how these divergent formations exemplify ma as a “constructed tradition,” shaped less by origins than by the ongoing production of discourse.

Attention then turns to the afterlives of Isozaki’s project, from partial reconstructions to recent transcultural iterations in Europe and Asia. These contemporary returns of ma show how the concept continues to generate new meanings, new curatorial experiments and new cross-cultural dialogues. In this sense, ma participates in an “eternal return,” reappearing in shifting forms and gaining renewed vitality with each act of reinterpretation.

Reassessing Isozaki’s exhibition within this broader conceptual and historiographical field positions ma not as a fixed cultural inheritance, but as an evolving and contested site of meaning that continues to shape curatorial practice today.