Island Odyssey
The northern half of Naoshima, scarred and polluted, is host to a tangle of industrial plants (image: Iwan Baan).
For Disegno’s 10th anniversary, we’re republishing 29 stories, one from each of the journal’s back issues, selected by our founder Joahnna Agerman Ross. From Disegno #1 she chose Julian Worrall’s visit to the islands of Japan’s Inland Sea, where post-industrial towns with ageing populations have been transformed by art museums.
The “Naoshima model” has transformed three islands in Japan’s Inland Sea into cultural destinations without comparison.
To cross Japan’s Inland Sea by train, you take the Great Seto Bridge from Onomichi on the mainland to Imabari on the island of Shikoku. The train with its precious cargo of human beings is held aloft toylike in an enormous cage of iron, hundreds of metres above the sea. Giant girders zigzag past the windows, turning the views of the dreamy landscape of overlapping islands feathering the horizon into a flickering film reel. For 20 minutes, the bridge performs a colossal hop, skip, and jump in slow motion across the Inland Sea, stretching from one granite island to the next with absolute confidence, gathering itself around each support before leaping again into the blue haze. Far below, beyond the dashing steelwork, the grey-green waters lap placidly at the feet of the massive pylons, unhurried and indifferent, a watery metronome gently marking the beats of a separate world, in its own time and space.
The port of Naoshima.
I am crossing this bridge on my way to a group of tiny islands in the Inland Sea that are the setting of an unlikely and extraordinary experiment. For more than two decades, the island of Naoshima and its neighbours have been the laboratory for an alternative vision of human progress to that represented by the Great Seto Bridge. With a population barely exceeding 3,400, whose ancestors subsisted on fishing and whose parents worked in heavy industry, and where to turn 60 is to finally reach the average age, the island has been gradually transformed into a magic garden of contemporary architecture and art. This transformation has been effected by a visionary local Medici named Soichiro Fukutake, the billionaire president of Benesse Holdings and avid art collector. Describing himself as “a revolutionary whose weapons are art and architecture”, Fukutake’s interventions at Naoshima commenced with an art museum-come-hotel hybrid by Tadao Ando built in 1992, and have extended to include two other Ando-designed museums; artworks in a half-dozen abandoned houses embedded in the island’s villages; a visitor centre designed by architectural firm SANAA6; and even a public bathhouse built as an art and architecture collaboration by artist Shinro Ohtake7 and creative group Graf.
As Naoshima’s garden blossomed, Fukutake has in recent years extended his attention to the neighbouring islands of Inujima and Teshima, installing ever more ambitious Art Sites – careful intertwinings of contemporary art, architecture, and landscape – on each. In 2010, he orchestrated the inaugural instance of a triennial art festival, the Seto International Art Festival, that sprinkled artworks and events across an archipelago of eight islands, attracting hundreds of thousands of art lovers from across Japan and the world over a three-month period. During the festival, the daily number of visitors to the islands outnumbered the resident populations many times over, bringing youth, wealth, and vitality to these quiet communities, remnants of an older Japan that is nearly lost to the modern world.
Visitors arriving on Naoshima are greeted by the artwork of Kusama Yayoi.
This year is not a festival year and the migratory flocks of the art world are elsewhere. But I am returning to Naoshima and visiting the neighbouring islands of Inujima and Teshima to breathe its air, refresh my spirit and check on the progress of Fukutake’s grand and subtle experiment.
Donald Richie, the doyen of living Western writers on Japan, visited Naoshima in the pages of The Inland Sea, his elegiac paean to this region written in the late 1960s. “Naoshima is a small, beautiful, somehow sad little island” he wrote then. “The sadness comes perhaps from the loneliness – in the early afternoons there never seems to be anyone on these islands.” Today, as my ferry sidles up to the dock on a wet and blustery afternoon, the pearly light reveals a scene unimaginable to Richie then: a mix of genteel seniors, handsome young couples, and a few fashionable females scattered picturesquely under the levitating white plane that forms the roof of the terminal building. A group of older foreigners study their guides. Nearby, a giant pumpkin sculpture in the unmistakable spotted livery of Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi, delights children. Even on a day of typhoon warnings, the island no longer seems lonely, in fact, it seems suffused with happiness.
People taking pictures in one of the colourful pumpkins by Yayoi.
While waiting for the shuttle to the hotel, I observe my fellow travellers. All these people are visitors, outsiders, urbanites. It is not just for the nature that they are here. The beauty of the island’s perfect bays and soft horizons is a necessary but not yet sufficient condition for their presence. It is art, framed by architecture, that fills the gap, and has motivated their visit. They have made time to find space. Naoshima holds out the promise of a place in which the contradictions that cleave contemporary life are transcended and healed – where art can deepen communion with nature; where the city can coexist with the village; and where the global can invigorate rather than erase the local.
The island, barely 14 sq km, is itself a model of such contradictions. The northern half, scarred and polluted, is host to an unlovely tangle of industrial plants for refining raw materials – and until the trickle of visiting art lovers became a steady stream the main economic basis for the island. It is the picturesque southern half where the locals live that visitors see. The island community is spread across three villages, each around a little harbour, charcoal studies of grey roof tiles and ash-blackened timber walls huddled between blue-green waters and deep green hills. The various facilities of the Naoshima Art Site, Fukutake’s domain, occupy much of the rest of the island. This includes the accommodation facilities of Benesse House and Museum, and the dedicated art museums of the Chichu Museum and the Lee Ufan Museum, all bearing the luxurious gravitas of Tadao Ando’s potent articulations of material, space, and elemental nature.
A boat arrives at the ferry terminal designed by SANAA on Naoshima.
After some time ensconced in the exquisitely hospitable spaces of Benesse House, soothed by the sound of a rushing stream nearby and misty horizons of the Inland Sea in the distance, and surrounded by pellucid depths of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s art, I began to feel the rub of a dilemma, one that I imagine is familiar for many utopians and other believers who seek paradise on earth. Should the divine be sought within the world or apart from it? The harmonious perfection of the environment around me left me missing the benign tensions of the everyday. Rather than spend my limited time diving deeper into the hermetic intensities of Ando’s underground museums, I hopped on a bicycle and rode back to Honmura village, to explore the Art House projects.
This is where the artistic mission of Benesse intersects most directly with its social goal of revitalising the local community. Using six houses which have fallen empty as frames for contemporary art, the Art House project invites visitors directly into the heart of the village world. The spaces are dark and potent, suffused both with ancestral spirits and the artists’ imagination. Subtlety of touch is a common thread in these interventions – and the experiences that are wrested from them are the richer for it. The mysterious presences in American artist James Turrell’s Minamidera take you to the trembling edge of visual perception, leaving you buoyant and tingling. Tatsuo Miyajima’s Kadoya scatters flickering LED counters, the timings of which were set by individual villagers, under dark pools where tatami mats once lay – an inverted constellation of luminous heartbeats.
Sea of Time ‘98 by Tatsuo Miyajima features flickering LED lights under dark pools of water.
At each entrance, a local attendant greets you and explains the work, encounters with people whose gentleness and dignity leave a mental dent as deep as that left by the art. Running late for the last entry to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s underground Go’o Shrine, I met Ueda-san, who with infinite patience ushered me to the entrance, a drainage tunnel driven straight into the side of the hill. Upon my re-emergence, beaming with pleasure at my delighted gratitude, he proceeded to tell me stories of the local shipyards where he worked; his daughter’s life in Australia; and his happiness at being able to meet so many fascinating people simply by sitting and waiting, overlooking the ever-changing sea.
In encounters like these, one of Fukutake’s guiding precepts is revealed: “The power of art,” he once told me, “is that it creates stories between strangers.” The conversations emerging from these stories become the glue that binds a community to one another, and to visitors.
James Turrell’s Open Sky in the Chichu Art Museum.
Naoshima may be small, but with a population of thousands it has the numbers to sustain essential public facilities such as a junior high school, a welfare facility, and a town hall. Inujima, an island which is one wet hour’s ride by speedboat from Naoshima, has a population of only 56, with an average age of 75. This is an example of what is called in Japan a “dead-end village”, where the end is now just a matter of time.
The question of sustainability is posed with brutal clarity in such a situation. Without a definitive influx from outside, in less than a decade there will be nothing left to sustain. Despite grim prospects, Fukutake has confronted the situation with another of his aphorisms: “Revive that which is. Create that which is not.” Inujima has become the laboratory for an approach to sustainability that rescues the old through creating the new.
The Chichu Art Museum is buried into a hill.
Inujima (the name means “dog island”) had been exploited for its natural resources since medieval times – granite quarried from its shores was used to build Osaka castle. In 1909, during Japan’s frenetic industrialization, a copper refinery was built on Inujima. The island location facilitated the supply of raw materials, and limited the impact of the pollution that had devastated the environments around other refineries on the mainland. But the jobs and prosperity brought by the refinery were short-lived – within a decade the copper price had crashed, and the facility was abandoned along with the community of 3,000 whom it had supported.
In 2007, the national government designated the site of the Inujima refinery as part of Japan’s industrial heritage. Fukutake built on this designation by engaging Hiroshima-based architect Hiroshi Sambuichi, and Japan-born, US-trained artist Yukinori Yanagi to give the vision tangible form in the Seirenjo (refinery) project.
Inside view from an underground chamber of the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima.
Built in red brick and “karami” masonry – blocks of congealed slag, the colour of coagulated blood – the russet bones of the refinery protrude through vegetation like the ruins of an ancient temple. These include a number of crumbling chimneys 20-30 metres high. In developing the architectural diagram, Sambuichi sought to harness what he calls the “energies of the landscape”. Poignant monuments to a lost industrial past, Sambuichi also grasped that the chimneys were ready-made ventilation engines, with the latent capacity to drive a passive system for heating and cooling interior spaces. “Revive that which is...” Herein lay the impetus for the plan.
Sambuichi devised a series of four linked halls: two “caves” buried underground, and two “sunrooms” functioning as greenhouses. Two are connected in series directly to the chimney, and the remaining two, one cave and one sunroom, form reservoirs of warm and cool air respectively that can be “switched” in or out of sequence using their common entrance as a spatial valve. This enables the interior climate to be conditioned by mixing these pools of air as required, with all the pressure differential needed being supplied by the chimney. A display in the separate reception building gives an overview of the temperatures in the different halls, so visitors can watch the process live.
Oval Hotel is situated on a hill and is connected to the Benesse House Museum by a monorail.
Each hall is both ventricle for ventilation and frame for art. In three halls, Yanagi has gathered the deconstructed elements of Japanese writer, actor and film director Yukio Mishima’s house into floating constellations of wood and paper, amidst the language and imagery of his writings. Mishima’s nativist critique of modernity is dispersed throughout the facility, mingling with Sambuichi’s parallel critique of modernity from the perspective of matter and energy. In a sublimation of these paired visions, the fourth and most extraordinary hall offers a beguiling path to the pure luminosity of the sun via a series of mirrors – a vision of the unattainability of the divine... or of nature herself?
Despite its careful imbrication of existing and introduced elements, in formal terms, the Seirenjo follows the typical model of a museum – a receptacle for art separated from daily life. The tiny settlement, housing the few dozen remaining residents at Inujima inverts this pattern, and its fabric provides the context for the other major intervention on the island – Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima’s6 series of subtle building-sized installations scattered throug-out the village. “Create that which is not”
Using six houses which have fallen empty as frames for contemporary art, the Art House project invites visitors directly into the heart of the village world.
Sejima has planned a number of delicate cubic, linear, and annular elements scattered on vacant lots along the traditional wooden houses of the village. Variously enclosed in mirror-finish aluminium and perfectly transparent acrylic, you encounter the buildings as ghostlike presences shimmering within the townscape. Reflection and transparency, twin techniques of disappearance, are the predominant means used. The buildings optically dissolve into their surroundings, while paradoxically bringing this world of wood and tile into focus, operating like environmental lenses.
This strategy of environmental dissolution and refocusing can be thought of as a strategy of camouflage. The boundaries between what is existing and what is new, and between what is exhibition and what simply is, are interlaced. The entire village gradually becomes a landscape suffused in the attentiveness that usually is reserved for art. As the inhabitants disappear one by one, a new village emerges, revalued as art. Landscape becomes exhibit. Sejima writes: “Art will become one with the local scenery, as existing houses and new structures become exhibition spaces and a new landscape emerges.” And with this new landscape, a new population of visitors eager to experience it as landscape, with new inhabitants to serve them.
Inujima from above with the remains of the copper refinery that now makes up part of
the Inujima refinery project in the foreground.
If Inujima is a Petri dish of art and social sustainability, Teshima is where art’s relation to nature herself is given full reign. This is achieved most vividly at the Teshima Art Museum, which being completed in October 2010 after a six-year collaboration between architect Ryue Nishizawa and the artist Rei Naito is the youngest of the interventions in these islands.
Art, we can probably agree, helps us see the world differently. More intensely, perhaps, or more clearly; or in a new and unfamiliar way. This requires a separation between the artwork and the world. Art sets up territories and borders, the lines that define where the ordinary world ends and the art begins – a frame, a plinth, a stage.
F-Art House by Kazuyo Sejima on Inujima.
But what if the artwork demands to include itself, the space that houses it, and even the surrounding environment as integral to its conception and perception? Where does the art stop and the world begin? Or could this separation between art and world in fact be transcended, in pursuit of a new understanding that encompasses both?
Teshima Art Museum prompts such reflections. The “museum” is in fact less a facility to house artworks than a gigantic art installation in its own right, set amidst a breathtaking landscape of terraced rice paddies high above the soft sea horizons.
A local dog poses for the camera.
When first seen from the road, the museum appears as a strikingly alien presence: two smooth globules, one large and spreading, one small and bead-like, emerging pristine from the ground as if they were the long-buried shells of eggs laid by some mythical creature. A pathway leads you through a copse of trees and past a sea view before arriving at the entry to the larger volume. You enter the space shoeless through a narrow funnel, which seamlessly expands to a vast interior cavern, 40 by 60 metres. Two large circular apertures open to the sky, filling the space with light and birdsong, which dance off the smoothly polished concrete in soft reflections and vibrant echoes. Several fine gossamer ribbons hang from the edges of the holes, registering the lightest movement of air. The space appears to capture and distill its surroundings.
But this is not all: added to this distillate of the real is a slice of magic. You soon notice that puddles of water are dotted across the spreading expanse of the floor, and gathered in larger pools under the openings in the roof. Closer inspection reveals this miniature landscape to be in constant motion – glistening rivulets dart from place to place, following imperceptible topographies. These puddles and streams are fed by tiny springs: droplets of ground water are beading out through the concrete floor. Tiny white discs and spheres affixed to the floor and ceiling form another family of elements. Naming the work Matrix, Naito describes her aim as “revealing to the linkage of all things, the infinite connections of life on earth, its hidden bliss.” All is subtle, yet filled with animation. In this creation, there is no boundary between the artwork, the space that enfolds it, and the energies that animate it.
The old cemetary next to the Nakanotani Gazebo by Kazuyo Sejima on Inujima.
As the boat pulls away from the Teshima dock, I can make out the museum as a dazzling white presence surrounded by golden rice terraces. It becomes apparent that the aesthetic treasures that the museum is framing are precisely those of the landscape itself, and in this, it brilliantly realises Fukutake’s brief to the artist and architect: “A place where art, architecture, and nature are one”.
With encounters between strangers prompted by contemporary art at Naoshima; built heritage and cultural landscapes revealed and revalued at Inujima; and the relation between human creations and nature herself reinterpreted as an seamless continuum at Teshima; these islands in the Inland Sea have begun to be seen as a model for an alternative approach to building places and communities. This so-called “Naoshima method” is emerging on other islands in the Inland Sea, and in other parts of Japan.
Mariko Mori’s sculpture, set in a lake on Teshima lights up at night.
A few hours by boat to the west, on the island of Omishima, is the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture, a new space for exhibition and interaction designed by Toyo Ito to foster discussion about architecture’s meaning and broader role. Built in the form of two “primitive huts” – one a replica of Toyo Ito’s first house, the elegant barrel-vaulted Silver Hut that made his name; and the second, the Steel Hut, a dark and faceted volume formed from regular polyhedra – the complex is a socially motivated yet deeply personal dialogue between two eras in the architect’s life and work. Ito was famous during the time of the Silver Hut for seeing in tje artificiality of Tokyo a “second nature”, populated by “new humans”. But in recent years, he has renounced this aesthetics of an intrinsically urban lightness of being, calling instead for a corporeal appreciation of the world in all its fleshy, earthy materiality. The “return to the real” in Ito’s thinking is analogous to the revaluing of the rural communities that is embodied in the Naoshima Method.
The Teshima Art Museum by Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito is set in the breathtaking landscape.
As Japan faces the monumental task of rebuilding its devastated northern coast and reconsiders its reliance on nuclear power, the Naoshima method presents a powerful vision for a way forward. It is an approach that offers a model of how art, architecture and other cultural assets can be at the centre of reconstruction plans, while also responding to the entrenched underlying problems of depopulation and over-reliance on environmentally destructive industries. Rather than the image of a monumental bridge to the future, like the Great Seto Bridge elevated far above the world it spans, the example of Naoshima suggests an elegant sailing vessel skipping across the waves – lightweight, self sufficient, and beautiful.
I took the boat, rather than the bridge, back to the mainland.
Words Julian Worrall
Photos Iwan Baan
This article was originally published in Disegno #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.