Naoshima Art House Project

We first tried to visit Minamidera, a collaboration between Tadao Ando and James Turrell, but the line to get in was so long that we decided to come back the next morning. On the hill above the village is the Go’o Shrine that has an installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto, so we climbed the steps to gather outside it. We waited a bit (kind of like being in a amusement park) but in the shade of scrubby oaks with views out to the glittering blue water below. I know Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos but had never seen an installation by him so was very interested to see what it would be. The mouth of a tunnel just one person wide opens up to the sea, walking down the tunnel, the rectangle of light gradually fades. Then, turning a corner, a glistening set of stairs, looking like it is made of blocks of ice, rises upward but terminates in a small crack of light at the top. After leaving this part, we walked around the shrine to find these steps emerging and ascending towards the shrine structure.

Kadoya, by Tatsuo Miyajima, was also on our wandering trek. The elegant lines of the old house surround a dark pool of water with digital flashing numbers floating in it.

Ishibashi is designed by Hiroshi Senju, but the house itself is so spectacular that it was for me a focus of the experience. It is a 150 year old salt merchant’s house with a huge warehouse behind. Senju’s work is a repeated image of a waterfall, flowing in liquid acrylic paint. In the former warehouse space the floor has been polished to a black mirror and the walls are covered with the image in blue and white of this flowing paint, reflecting in the floor below. In the center courtyard is a stone bridge (Ishi Bashi) with gravel under it symbolically flowing towards the sea in the distance. Of course, this work was especially interesting to me as it relates to my own fascination with landscape and architectural spaces as maps/symbolic microcosms of larger, encompassing spaces.

Gokaisho, by Yoshihiro Suda, is a simple and poetic space. Two small tatami rooms face onto an open courtyard with gravel and a single camellia tree in a pool of moss. Inside, intricate realistic wooden carved camellia blossoms are scattered across the tatami, pink, white, and pink/white. The camellia has been grafted to grow all three colors, but of course it was not blooming currently when I visited. Another simulacrum of nature! No wonder I love Japan!

In contrast to all this austere elegance, Haisha, the house designed by Shinro Ohtake, was refreshing. So much so that while in all the others we spoke in whispers, in here people laughed and chatted. The gutted house is plastered with all kinds of crap and rusted sheet metal. Inside, layers of paint evoke the inside of an old house with the ancient paint peeling to reveal a new old color underneath. The ceilings have been torn out to create huge vertical spaces in contrast to the horizontal focus of the traditional homes. In the back room, this space is completely filled with a bloated white Statue of Liberty with blinking neon surrounded by postcards from New York stuck to the walls. I felt so relieved and at home in this place.

The next morning we went first thing to the Minamidera (bad idea to go into a pitch black James Turrell space before coffee, but we made it through). We lined up with others who had the same idea to get there first thing in the morning. They allow exactly 16 people at a time into the space. On entering , everyone stumbles about, groping the walls and each other trying to sit on the benches in the back of the space. Finally settled, chatting continues for a few minutes but after a bit, silence descends. No one can see each other or anything, although, very gradually, three light areas become visible at the end of the room. Still, everyone sits silently listening to each other breathe. At last one person stands and walks towards the lights. The spell is broken and we all rise and walk, unsure of our feet, shuffling into the dark to unveil the mystery of the glow at the end of the room. Emerging from the space, everyone blinks at each other and rubs eyes as the people still in line inspect to see what effect the work has had.

We camped out at the Mongolian Yurt tent site on the beach- Naoshima just gets better and better! We had delicious sashimi dinner too! In the next post- worshipping both modern and pomo in Tadao Ando’s temple of art! Yippee!