Issue:
March 2024
The Naoshima experience is unsettling … and brilliant.
In a country that has lost its appetite for silence, an unremitting commentary accompanies the ferry trip from Takamatsu to Naoshima, a small island in Japan’s Inland Sea.
Known in the dim recesses of history as a place of refuge for the exiled Emperor Sutoku, the fortunes of the island were in freefall by the early 1980s, with its population down to little more than 3,000 as youngsters left for better prospects on the mainland. The opening of the upmarket hotel Benesse House and a flurry of art projects beginning in 1992 played a large part in transforming an island previously known for its fishing communities and as a source of industrial pollution. There are still smelters and a copper refinery on the northern shore, but the serious pursuit of art has succeeded in creating a counter world on Naoshima – a utopia of ideas.
The island’s main art sites lay southeast of the port of Miyanoura, along a coastal road with raised views of empty beaches and wind-sculptured dunes. It’s an easy walk along this undulating route to the Chichu Art Museum, founded by Benesse’s president to house paintings in Monet’s Water Lily series. The corridors leading to the galleries contain sculptures and installations by important contemporary artists such as James Turrell and Walter de Maria.
Back on the coastal road, more public installations materialize, with a sign soon directing visitors through a glade above a beach to the Cultural Melting Bath, artist Cai Gui Quang’s open-air Jacuzzi work, surrounded, like a Druid’s circle, by 36 limestone rocks brought from China. Just up the road, the Benesse House Museum, designed by Tadao Ando, is one of the cultural highlights of the island. A passionate advocate of treated concrete, Ando has said of his Naoshima projects that he wishes to “sink the architecture into the earth so that it matches the shape of the land”. This is rather like what wartime concrete bunkers did. Is it possible to blend concrete, which quickly discolors and erodes in a very non-biodegradable fashion, into natural environs?
Passing a converted dental clinic with a white Statue of Liberty soaring through its inner nest of beams and rafters, I’m soon facing one of the island’s most popular works, Yayoi Kasumi’s 2.5 meter-wide black and yellow pumpkin, placed at the end of a pier overlooking the Inland Sea. I suddenly recall that the objet d’art was blown out to sea in a typhoon a couple of years ago, though frantic Benesse staff were able to retrieve it.
Leaving the iconic vegetable, the road veers inland, rejoining the coast as it hits the eastern shoreline and the route to the old fishing village of Honmaru. The avowed aim of Honmaru’s Art House Project was to restore aging properties and transform them into works of art under the creative direction of professional artists and designers. An awareness of architecture and space are the dominant factors throughout, with those involved in the project making the utmost effort to collaborate with the former occupants, creating environments that are in harmony with Japanese aesthetics and traditions. Suddenly, ordinary homeowners, simple fisherfolk, found themselves assigned roles as custodians of the arts.
In reinventing its identity, Naoshima has achieved a rare degree of autarchy that may only be possible on islands. The German philosopher and cultural theorist, Peter Sloterdijk, has written regarding Naoshima that “islands have afforded man the opportunity of rejuvenating culture on a smaller scale”. The inordinate degree of sequestration afforded by island life also means a partial disengagement from mainland rules and standards, a liberation that provides ideal circumstances for experimentation.
Without sounding cynical, however, just how good is the art on Naoshima? It’s a form of heresy to suggest there is a fair share of sub-standard art here, but, then, what exactly is the standard, and who makes it? Who decides whether a piece is a towering work of art, or clever eye-candy? It’s unquestionably far easier to condemn art than to praise it. You have to tread carefully in the world of art, lest people think you are unschooled. This put me in mind of a cocktail party I attended back in the late 1970s at the house of the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, in the Catalan fishing village of Cadaques. I recall our host visibly bristling after I suggested that not everyone might consider him a genius. My own unvoiced thoughts on the subject were that he was, indeed, a genius, but not a great artist.
As a relief from the overwhelming jam of art on Naoshima, I decided to take myself off for the morning to the nearby island of Teshima, in search of the Yokoo Tadanori House Garden, a collaboration with the architect Yuko Nagayama. I’ve always liked the artist’s poster work and psychedelic paintings. Active since the 1960s, Tadanori, a prolific graphic designer, printmaker, illustrator, stage set designer and figurative artist, has appropriated ideas from the expressionist, abstract and surrealist movements, forging a style that mixes pastiche and sixties psychedelia. An engagement in science fiction, spiritualism, comic art, woodblock printing, and Japanese aesthetics surface in his creations, many of which seek, through dark, satirical humor and allegory, to usurp nostalgia. I wasn’t quite prepared, though, for his take on the Japanese landscape form.
First reactions to his garden project are predictably mixed. Some visitors will be spellbound, others repelled at its sullying of tradition. The occasional visitor will burst into hysterical laughter. No one will be indifferent or leave without an opinion. This is no doubt a calculated effect on behalf of Tadanori, known for blurring the line in his role as artist provocateur, between innovation and hoax. An exercise in counter-intuitive aesthetics, several ornamental objects, a plastic crane and turtle, and blue and yellow mosaic tiles among them, items easily picked up in the discount corners of home centers, add to the curiosity, or effrontery, felt by the viewer. In creating this disturbing, but iridescent work, Tadanori has deconstructed the Japanese garden and reassembled it in his own iconoclastic, color-saturated vision. Tadanori’s early pop art style follows, as the late writer Donald Richie put it, “a hard-edged cartoon line in bright kindergarten colors”. Look closely at the rock dispositions, alignments and spacing, though, and we see that the artist has a surprisingly sophisticated grasp of Japanese garden design.
Back on Naoshima, I quickly stumbled upon an arresting back road installation, entitled Another Rebirth 2005-N. The four-meter tall, garbage filled waste basket, made from glazed stoneware, iron, fragmented tile and slag, stands defiantly in a patch of weeds. In common with countless public works projects in Japan that are initiated with great enthusiasm and then subjected to neglect and under maintenance, the bin was slowly turning into decomposing garbage. Was that, perhaps, the artist’s intention?
If the purpose of art is to unsettle us, to upend and trick wire expectations and assumptions, you would have to concede that the Naoshima experience succeeds brilliantly.
Stephen Mansfield is the author of three books on the Japanese garden, including Japan’s Master Gardens: Lessons in Space & Environment.
