This paper takes up “The Japan International Art Exhibition (Tokyo Biennale)”, the first international art exhibition in Japan after World War II. In 1952, the first exhibition was held under the auspices of the Mainichi Newspaper Company until 1990, the 18th and last one. During this time, the exhibition was unavoidably changed by the movements of the times, but we still haven’t researched the exhibitions as a whole.

In this paper, I have collected numerous articles about “The Japan International Art Exhibition” and have inspected the intentions. As a result, we can find that the intentions shifted from the “across-the-board” structure in the situation of “Japan against the World” to “avantgardism”. In being avant-garde, on the other hand, the exhibition had the condition of a conservative bias against the West’s sense of values or systematized “Art”. With the end of the binomial opposition of “Japan and the World”, “simultaneity” was then pursued, but the “Japanese originality” in the “simultaneity” wasn’t pursued carefully enough. Japan has continually been involved with the problem of institutionalizing “Art” and the context peculiar to Japan since modern times. After WWII it was again expressed in this international exhibition.

Thus, “The Japan International Art Exhibition” formed an important stage for criticism in Japan after WWII and has always relativized the position of “Japan”.