Day 13 in Japan: Naoshima
And so by ferry to
Naoshima.
This was the first island visited by Donald Richie in The Inland Sea, the one whose main attraction was a friendly fifteen year old schoolgirl who inexplicably, as he tells it, turned down his sexual advances. It was a poor fishing village when he visited it, more than 30 years ago. And my impression is that things got a lot worse in the intervening years, so that when the multinational corporation Benesse moved in with its art initiative the island got a new lease of life. Our Lonely Planet guide mentioned Naoshima, but makes it sound as attractive as the foyer of a multinational's head office. None of the Japanese people we spoke to had heard of it: the policewoman who took down our addresses in Nara, for instance, asked what Prefecture it was in and pretended to be satisfied when I drew her a map.
The ferry from Takamatsu was huge, and though it wasn't crowded we were a long way from being the only passengers. Most of our fellow-travellers were young people, possibly university students. There were plenty of earrings and tattoos visible, on both genders, which we'd observed and been told are rare except among the hip young and the Yakuza. We'd booked into our first ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and it turned out to be very close to the ferry terminal. We checked in, noted with relief that though we were to share a bathroom and toilet, they were set up for one person at a time rather than communal affairs and it was a western toilet. We also had twin beds rather than futons, so the ryokan wasn't completely traditional.
The afternoon was young, so we decided to explore, and caught the bus to the Chichu Art Museum, which wasn't very far as the crow flies, but almost a complete circumference of the island by bus, all of half an hour. It's not a big island, the bus goes regularly, and every time we took it over the next couple of days it was crowded. So we rode from the ferry village, through the other village, which we think of as the art village, past Benesse Hotel and the Benesse Museum, to our destination.
This Museum is the work of Tadao Ando, the architect of Kyoto Railway Station, and is a work of art in itself. From the ticket office we made our way along a path that climbed a small hill -- along the path grew a profusion of European flowering plants, which the ticket/leaflet explained were plants found in Monet's garden at Giverny. Near the top of the hill was a concrete wall with a narrow opening in it, all that was visible of the museum, which, it turns out is almost all underground.
It was a magical experience: the building is designed to house works by three artists: there's a room with four Monets, one of them huge: you take your shoes off to enter the room, which is white, windowless and lit by natural light (from above). A vast hall contains a work by Walter De Maria, though the hall is built around the work rather than containing it: a giant polished stone ball rests half way up a flight of stairs, reflecting the light from the skylight, watched by groups of gold-leaf coated pillars. And there's a section devoted to James Turrell. I don't know how to talk about his work. He does stuff with light, and you have to be there. Again we had to take our shoes off and were ushered into a room in small groups -- there were five in our group. We are invited to climb a number of steps and face what at first looked like a luminous blue screen. The screen turned out to be a room, impossible to tell how deep, which we were invited to enter. And we walked into this blue light -- that is to say, we were walking in light the way you swim underwater. That's all the description you're going to get from me tonight. We visited a similar work by Turrell the next day, so I'll try again then. Enough to say for now that this museum enforced a way of being still with a piece of art that is a new experience for me -- not necessarily the being still, but having an environment that enforced it. You couldn't go into that building and pass from exhibit to exhibit: you simply had to let each one of them have its way with you.
More about Naoshima tomorrow.
This was the first island visited by Donald Richie in The Inland Sea, the one whose main attraction was a friendly fifteen year old schoolgirl who inexplicably, as he tells it, turned down his sexual advances. It was a poor fishing village when he visited it, more than 30 years ago. And my impression is that things got a lot worse in the intervening years, so that when the multinational corporation Benesse moved in with its art initiative the island got a new lease of life. Our Lonely Planet guide mentioned Naoshima, but makes it sound as attractive as the foyer of a multinational's head office. None of the Japanese people we spoke to had heard of it: the policewoman who took down our addresses in Nara, for instance, asked what Prefecture it was in and pretended to be satisfied when I drew her a map.
The ferry from Takamatsu was huge, and though it wasn't crowded we were a long way from being the only passengers. Most of our fellow-travellers were young people, possibly university students. There were plenty of earrings and tattoos visible, on both genders, which we'd observed and been told are rare except among the hip young and the Yakuza. We'd booked into our first ryokan (traditional Japanese inn), and it turned out to be very close to the ferry terminal. We checked in, noted with relief that though we were to share a bathroom and toilet, they were set up for one person at a time rather than communal affairs and it was a western toilet. We also had twin beds rather than futons, so the ryokan wasn't completely traditional.
The afternoon was young, so we decided to explore, and caught the bus to the Chichu Art Museum, which wasn't very far as the crow flies, but almost a complete circumference of the island by bus, all of half an hour. It's not a big island, the bus goes regularly, and every time we took it over the next couple of days it was crowded. So we rode from the ferry village, through the other village, which we think of as the art village, past Benesse Hotel and the Benesse Museum, to our destination.
This Museum is the work of Tadao Ando, the architect of Kyoto Railway Station, and is a work of art in itself. From the ticket office we made our way along a path that climbed a small hill -- along the path grew a profusion of European flowering plants, which the ticket/leaflet explained were plants found in Monet's garden at Giverny. Near the top of the hill was a concrete wall with a narrow opening in it, all that was visible of the museum, which, it turns out is almost all underground.
It was a magical experience: the building is designed to house works by three artists: there's a room with four Monets, one of them huge: you take your shoes off to enter the room, which is white, windowless and lit by natural light (from above). A vast hall contains a work by Walter De Maria, though the hall is built around the work rather than containing it: a giant polished stone ball rests half way up a flight of stairs, reflecting the light from the skylight, watched by groups of gold-leaf coated pillars. And there's a section devoted to James Turrell. I don't know how to talk about his work. He does stuff with light, and you have to be there. Again we had to take our shoes off and were ushered into a room in small groups -- there were five in our group. We are invited to climb a number of steps and face what at first looked like a luminous blue screen. The screen turned out to be a room, impossible to tell how deep, which we were invited to enter. And we walked into this blue light -- that is to say, we were walking in light the way you swim underwater. That's all the description you're going to get from me tonight. We visited a similar work by Turrell the next day, so I'll try again then. Enough to say for now that this museum enforced a way of being still with a piece of art that is a new experience for me -- not necessarily the being still, but having an environment that enforced it. You couldn't go into that building and pass from exhibit to exhibit: you simply had to let each one of them have its way with you.
More about Naoshima tomorrow.
Posted: Sat - September 27, 2008 at 10:46 PM |
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This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
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A note on comments: You can read comments on the same page as the entry rather than in a pop-up window, by clicking on the category button ("Mollie" etc) at the end of the entry and then on the "Read more" button.
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