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Benesse Art Site Naoshima

by John McGee

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed, 1980-1997, gelatin silver print (Photos 
courtesy Benesse Art Site Naoshima)

You could hate contemporary art and still love Naoshima. It's a romantic destination in Japan's version of the Mediterranean, a lush island with crescents of coarse sand lapped by the transparent-green Seto Inland Sea. 

For art fans it's even better. Perched high on a southern cape looking across the water to Shikoku is Benesse Art Site Naoshima (formerly known as Benesse House Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum). Cai Guo-Qiang's Cultural Melting Bath (1998) exemplifies the mood. The interactive installation—a Jacuzzi surrounded by Chinese limestone boulders set in a seaside forest—is perfect for watching the sun set behind the distant Seto Ohashi Bridge. 

There are no bridges to Naoshima. The journey into art paradise starts with a short ferry ride, a liquid buffer between harried city and island calm. You wind past small islets and through a narrow channel to arrive at a village. A 15-minute bus ride later, you reach the museum complex. 

The two Tadao Ando-designed buildings sit on a ridge like a low-slung modernist castle overlooking the sea. Rough stone walls rise just above a tangle of foliage. The lower structure, the main museum, has an interior of smooth, cast concrete in interlocking geometric forms. It contains a small but good collection of work by modern and contemporary masters like Richard Long's circles of mud, stones and driftwood (1997), Jasper Johns' painting White Alphabets (1968), and Bruce Nauman's flashing neon 100 Live and Die (1984). On the walls of an open patio outside hang Hiroshi Sugimoto's black and white photos of seascape horizons (Time Exposed, 1980-97).

Cai Guo-Qiang , Cultural Melting Bath: Project for Naoshima, 1998, 
Chinese limestone, Jacuzzi, hot water, herbs, changing room 

Above the main building is the Annex, a small hotel curved around an elliptical pond. Each room features artworks from the museum collection and incredible views (including the Ando-designed Chichu Art Museum on an adjacent bluff). 

From here you can also see down to the International Camp Area, a collection of white tents and round Mongolian pao (aka ger or yurt) set in a grassy valley with the beach as a front yard and tanuki (raccoon dogs) as regular visitors. Art is spread around the grounds, from Dan Graham's mirror-glass room, Cylinder Bisected by a Plane (1995) under pine trees, to Yayoi Kusama's oversized yellow and black Pumpkin (1994) at the end of a pier. 

In 1997, the museum initiated the Art House Project in the nearby village of Honmura, restoring old houses and turning them into permanent exhibitions for individual artists. A short walking tour takes in all of them. Inside the simple Kinza is Rei Naito's delicate collection of marbles and wires. A 200-year-old house with the town's characteristic exterior of white mortar walls and scorched cedar boards holds three number pieces by Tatsuo Miyajima. 

Two works are new constructions at ancient sites. James Turrell's low-light perception piece is in an Ando-designed, windowless, dark wood temple. Hiroshi Sugimoto's small Go'o Shrine looks typical except for a rough, cast glass staircase extending from the wooden structure down into a crypt. 

In Honmura, you also meet some of the island's 3,600 inhabitants. They are almost uniformly elderly and friendly, taking pride in, and looking after, the art houses. 

"Harmony between Nature, Architecture and Art" was education and publishing giant Benesse's concept when they opened the museum in 1992. Slogans like this have been used to such banal ends elsewhere that it's invigorating to find them so well integrated here. You'll want to stay longer.

Benesse Art Site Naoshima is in Gotanji, Naoshima-cho, Kagawa-gun, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan.

To reach Naoshima, take a shinkansen to Okayama, then a local train to JR Uno station. Or fly to Takamatsu in Shikoku. Ferries run regularly from both towns. See website for complete information. www.naoshima-is.co.jp (in English and Japanese)

©2006 John McGee

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