Nuit des Musées 2025: the nocturnal program at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris

La Nuit des Musées is one of the highlights of theParisian cultural calendar. Every year, this event invites us to rediscover our heritage and cultural sites through an attractive program of events and free nocturnal visits. For this 2025 edition, the Maison de la Culture du Japon joins in the fun and invites us to enjoy a cultural treat this Saturday, May 17.

Throughout the year, the Maison de la Culture du Japon delights us with fascinating temporary exhibitions designed to immerse us in the heart of the Land of the Rising Sun. The MCJP, for short, is a window on the Empire of the Rising Sun in Paris. Established in 1997 on the banks of the Seine, in the 15th arrondissement, this cultural establishment's mission is to promote Japanese culture in France through a rich and varied program. Exhibitions of traditional and contemporary art, live performances, film screenings, conferences and language workshops make the MCJP an ideal place to discover and deepen your knowledge of Japanese culture.

• To be read
• This week in Paris, from June 16 to 22, 2025: free or affordable outings

The Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris plays a crucial role in strengthening cultural ties between France and Japan. It is part of a long history of artistic and intellectual exchanges between the two countries, dating back to the 19th century. The MCJP building, designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, reflects the harmony between modernity and tradition that is an essential feature of Japanese culture. Its impressive structure and strategic location on the banks of the Seine make the MCJP a landmark in Paris's cultural landscape.

The MCJP's programming is as diverse as Japanese culture itself. Temporary exhibitions offer a glimpse of the many facets of Japanese art, while performances of theater, dance, traditional and contemporary music invite us to immerse ourselves in the richness of Japanese cultural expression.

Discover the program for Museum Night 2025 at the Japanese House of Culture :

• Free admission to the exhibition "The Ecology of Things - A look at Japanese artists and their environments from 1970 to the present day".
  Saturday, May 17, 2025 - 11:00 ⤏ 22:00
  

  The MCJP, in partnership with the Frac Sud - Cité de l'art contemporain and with the support of the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole ( MAMC+), is organizing a two-part exhibition* in Paris and Marseille, linking the work of Japanese artists of different generations with ecological issues. Bringing together some fifty works, including some from Japan never before shown in France, this double exhibition reveals the richness of a Japanese art scene that is still little known to the public.

  The "Ecology of Things" exhibition offers a fresh reading of the links between artistic practices that emerged in Japan in the late 1960s, against a backdrop of massive reconstruction and industrialization, and those of contemporary artists addressing current environmental issues. Through previously unpublished dialogues, she proposes to reassess how certain pioneering works from major art movements in Japan such as Mono-ha (L'école des choses) or Fluxus were already taking an attentive look at our living environments in a social and ecological, intimate and collective dimension. If the practices of Noboru Takayama or Kishio Suga (Mono-ha), for example, call on the memory and inherent history of our environments through the use and confrontation of raw materials, whether of natural or industrial origin, those of Hideki Umezawa and Koichi Sato or Hiroshi Yoshimura invest the medium of sound to compose musical and visual landscapes in response to certain architectures, thus creating glimmers of calm in unexpected places. These approaches echo those favored by some of the Fluxus artists featured here (Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi and Takako Saito) and their use of language. But more than a simple rereading, the aim of this exhibition is also to underline the singularity with which these artists call upon their medium and their sensibility, not hesitating to shake up their practices and their materials, in order to conceive and share works that are more attentive to our ways of living. In other words, artists who have made the choice, as society has changed, of a certain ecology towards things.