My three days on the islands in the Seto Inland Sea have definitely been the highlight of my trip so far. Naoshima island is really one of the most special and unique places I've ever been to! Towards the end of the 20th century it was turned into an art and architecture project in an attempt to revitalise the local area which, like many rural places in Japan, was decaying due to the numbers of people moving to urban areas. As a result, the island has the most amazing contemporary art museums I've been to, as well as a variety of other fantastic art projects. I've had to split my post about Naoshima island into two posts, because I've seen so many amazing things and have so much to write about!
The best airbnb in the world
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| Airbnb common room and Yoshio preparing the feast |
My 700 km journey from Tokyo to Mukaejima island, where I was staying in an airbnb, was relatively relaxing. I took my first ever bullet train to Okayama which was amazing, mainly due to the very generous leg room available. This was followed by two very wobbly local trains (I checked the bathrooms and they were still spotless - how?!) to Uno port. I just about suppressed the urge to shout "UNO!" whenever I saw a sign. From there I took a ferry to Naoshima island and my airbnb host Yoshio picked me up in his little motorboat and took me to Mukaejima island, only about 100m away. I had to wait for him for over half and hour and an old drunk Japanese man joined me and talked at me for the entire time. For all I knew he could have been telling me his life story. I just hoped he wasn't trying to tell me that a serial killer lived on the other island who regularly picked up tourists.
Fortunately, the airbnb was wonderful. It's basically a hostel with many guests at the same time. I stayed in a traditional Japanese room with tatami mats and sliding doors in an old house 30 metres away from the main house. The main house had some dorms and a common room where every evening the guests and the hosts prepared a feast together for dinner. My first night there were dumplings, grilled fish, chicken, miso soup, rice, mashed pumpkin, potatoes and baked radish, and it was the most delicious meal I've ever had. And the food only got better each night! I stayed there for four nights and Yoshio ferried us between the two islands every day.
Tadao Ando and Naoshima's museums
Tadao Ando is a famous Japanese self-taught architect. I never truly appreciated architecture until I saw his work on Naoshima which so beautifully complemented its surroundings and the work of the artists inside his buildings. He believes that "to change the dwelling is to change the city and to reform society"(wikipedia). This is certainly in tune with his work on Naoshima, which has changed a decaying island into a centre for contemporary art and a wonderful destination for foreign and Japanese tourists alike.
Zen Buddhism greatly influenced his art, and it is this aspect which impressed me the most. Zen emphasises simplicity and focuses on inner feeling and experience rather than on outer appearance. Ando's buildings principally use a light-coloured concrete and are often mainly underground. Because of this, his buildings seem somewhat unimpressive from the outside, but the interior spaces and the way they are laid out are phenomenal.
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| Entrance of Lee Ufan museum |
I especially saw this in the first museum I went to, the Lee Ufan Museum. Lee Ufan is a minimalist Korean artist known for his contribution to contemporary art in Japan. While I liked his ideas, what made his work really special was the combination of his pieces with Ando's architecture. It was clear that the museum was designed as a whole, rather than as a building in which to display various exhibitions. The museum is situated at the top of a valley with outdoor artworks on a meadow sloping down to the beach and sea. The entrance of the museum is hidden behind concrete walls forming two corridors you have to walk through to get to the reception.
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| Shadow Room, www.studioleeufan.org |
Each art work corresponded perfectly with the room it was in. The first room, Encounter Room,
was bright with six minimalist paintings hanging on the walls, all combinations of glue or oil and stone pigment on a large canvas. In the middle was a sculpture which I particularly liked called Relatum, a steel plate cracked into four sections, covered by a glass plate with a natural rock sitting on the point where the cracks meet. The intact glass plate is impossible and acts as a transparent barrier between cause and consequence. Ufan's art thematised the natural location of the modern building, often just combining a natural rock with a plate or rod of steel. After the bright room you enter a dark corridor leading into three dark rooms. I loved the last one, called Shadow Room, a narrow concrete corridor with just one rock sitting in the middle. A light came from behind casting a black shadow and a series of video clips were projected onto the shadow, including a wandering moon, a busy road crossing, and waves crashing onto the shore. The effect was surreal, an unreal, dream-like space where you can watch an accelerated, repetitive outside world through a shadow on the floor. I've never seen a museum like it, with every aspect (of course including the bathroom) complementing and referencing the rest and creating a complex relationship between interior and exterior worlds.
I walked from the Lee Ufan museum along the beach and up a hill to Benesse House, a hotel and museum complex also designed by Tadao Ando. Opened in 1992, the brochure says it focuses on the concept of "coexistence of nature, architecture and art", so along very similar lines as the Lee Ufan museum. The brochure, in typical Japanese translation style, also wished: "may your encounter with art here, sublimed by the stunning landscapes of the Seto Inland Sea, be a delightful and enriching experience."
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| Time Exposed, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1980-97, Benesse House |
It definitely was, although the museum wasn't as perfectly coherent as the Lee Ufan museum. It has forty contemporary artworks spread over three floors by a wide variety of Japanese and international artists, including Andy Warhol. Again, the sprawling architecture was amazing and often played off the art and vice versa. For example I really liked the piece Time Exposed by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Along two walls are a number of photographs which initially all look like the same image, blocks of white and black. When you look closer, you realise they are all images of an ocean. Over almost two decades, Sugimoto took photographs of oceans from different corners of the world, exploring the concepts of time, distance and unity. The works were displayed on Ando's characteristic concrete walls outside, with a gap looking out on the Sea, offering a view similar to the subject of the work and inspiring a sensation of the timelessness of nature. As the photographs are permanently outdoors, they themselves show the wear of time through fading and exposure to various weather conditions. I found the exhibition comforting somehow, that no matter what we do to the planet, no matter what buildings we build and how easy it has become to travel across the world, the ocean will outlive us.
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| Sonatine for Goldfish, Nam June Paik, 1992 http://ffffound.com |
I found some of the other artworks at Benesse House simply hilarious. The American Korean artist Nam June Paik put an aquarium inside a cast of a TV. There's a goldfish swimming around inside which many people found amazing and definitely spent longer looking at than the other artworks put together. The piece is as old as I am, and all I could think about was how many goldfish have they put inside that TV set in the last 23 years? I guess the piece is also a comment on our perception of the world we find ourselves in... the series of goldfish must all have died with a god complex, having spent their lives being stared at in awe and hearing the questions "is it a real goldfish? What does it mean?" Another funny piece was Jonathan Borofsky's Three Chattering Men, 1986, which comprises of three statues of men attached to speakers repeating the word "chatter, chatter, chatter". The recorded men had an American accent and I was just reminded of all the American travellers I've met who just won't stop talking about nothing. (Sorry Americans!)
I could probably write a novel about all the art I saw in Benesse House, but for the sake of (relative) brevity I will move on to the Chichu Art Museum, also brilliantly designed by Ando. This is definitely the most popular museum on the island, and you have to go there early to get timed tickets for later in the day. The museum is entirely underground with only windows visible from above.
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| Chichu Art Museum, Photo: Iwan Baan, (http://111.89.141.224/en/chichu) |
There are only three "art spaces" inside, the most popular being a large room lit by natural light displaying five pieces from Monet's Water Lily series. The Japanese are absolutely obsessed with Monet, and while in the past I always found his repetitive themes somewhat boring, I gained a new appreciation for him in this room. The reason the museum needs timed tickets is that they only let a few people into any art space at one time, meaning that you have a much more personal experience of the art. There is nothing as disappointing as going to the Louvre in Paris to see the Mona Lisa, only to find a tiny canvas surrounded by a crowd of tourists struggling to take pictures. Understandably, of course, because reproduced images of the Mona Lisa are so rare... Being almost alone with these paintings in a large, bright room was incredible. The paintings were from Monet's later life, and therefore more experimental and rough in style. I found that the further away I stood, the clearer they became, and it was fun experimenting to find the ideal distance from each painting.
Another art space was one giant hall (below), called Time/ Timeless/ No Time by Walter de Maria. When my friend (from the airbnb) and I first went in, it took our breath away. It was unexpectedly large and cavernous, and we were the first to enter. My friend, Maja, said it reminded her of a cathedral, while I had immediately thought of ancient temples and sacrificial alters. The window to the sky, the steps, the organ-pipe-like gold leaf sculptures, and the mysterious, 2.2m diameter granite sphere, all felt religious or mystical and, combined, certainly impressive. This space is also a prime example for how Tadao Ando and the respective artists (excluding Monet, for some reason) worked together to create the museum. The architecture in these museums is part of the art, which, in any other space, wouldn't have half the impact.
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| Time/ Timeless/ No Time, Walter de Maria, 2004 openbuildings.com |
Coming up: Naoshima Island, Part Two, starring art as an interactive experience and Teshima Island
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