Edited books by Jens Sejrup
Global Art in Local Art Worlds: Changing Hierarchies of Value, 2023
This chapter analyzes the decade-long process of having Le Corbusier’s building for the National ... more This chapter analyzes the decade-long process of having Le Corbusier’s building for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The 1959 building was part of a French tri-continental serial nomination involving buildings by the renowned architect in seven different countries. After its first inception in 2007, the initiative failed twice before finally obtaining UNESCO inscription in 2016. Before the French initiative, the Japanese authorities had yet to designate Le Corbusier’s building as an important cultural property. However, over the ensuing decade, the building took on new meaning to the Japanese public as government and local agents vigorously pursued its World Heritage inscription. The Japanese authorities originally founded the museum in response to French-government preconditions for returning the renowned Matsukata collection to Japanese ownership after the Second World War. The building’s world-heritagization reveals the emergence and consolidation of a paradoxical double symbolism: on the one hand, Le Corbusier’s building has become internationally acknowledged and heritagized as a testament to a universal global modernity while, on the other hand, it has achieved local recognition as a symbol of an innate national capacity for localization and for Japan’s post-war reconstruction and peaceful democratic national identity.
Routledge, 2023
This book explores the attribution and local negotiation of cultural valuations of artistic and a... more This book explores the attribution and local negotiation of cultural valuations of artistic and art-institutional practices around the world, and considers the diverse ways in which these value attributions intersect with claims of universality and cosmopolitanism. Taking Michael Herzfeld’s notion of the “global hierarchy of value” as point of departure, the volume brings together six empirical studies of the collection, circulation, classification and exhibition of objects in present-day Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa and Indigenous Australia in light of Euro-America’s loss of global hegemony. Including reflections by a number of senior scholars, the chapters demonstrate that the question of valuation lies at the heart of artistic and art-institutional practices writ large – including museum practices, museum architecture, galleries, auction houses, art fairs and biennales.
Papers by Jens Sejrup
The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, 2023
In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions ... more In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming the sites, turning them into museums and exhibition spaces and giving rise to thorough reform of the surrounding urban fabric. In this paper I trace the involved agents’ motivations to engage in historical reconstruction from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of important historical locations to boost city attraction values. In this way, I link these two unfolding projects in Nara and Nagasaki to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realitie...
Focusing empirically on transcultural phenomena in-and-out of China, South Korea, and Indonesia, ... more Focusing empirically on transcultural phenomena in-and-out of China, South Korea, and Indonesia, the three papers in this special section of The Journal of Transcultural Studies interrogate important aspects of transcultural circulations and exhibitions of objects between Euro-America and the Asia-Pacific, both historically and currently.
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Edited books by Jens Sejrup
Papers by Jens Sejrup