Day 14 in Japan: All day in Naoshima



Our one full day in Naoshima began with the first traditional Japanese breakfast of the trip. We arrived in the dining room, where we'd had a delicious dinner the previous night, to find the tables all laid out with five or six small pottery bowls -- smoked mackerel, several slices of sashimi (Penny refused to eat raw fish, so I had a double serve, and you'll hear no complaints from me), pickles, a square of sweet omelette. Our hostess brought us a bowl of miso soup, told us to help ourselves to rice, and managed to communicate that we could have toast and jam, which none of the other guests -- all of them Japanese -- were given, and a choice of tea or coffee. By the time we went back to our room, we were complete converts to the Japanese approach to breakfast, though we could have done without the toasted white bread.

The day was fabulous. We took the bus to the other side of the island, and spent several hours wandering through Honmura, the village that is home to the Art House Project. A small number of houses in the village have been bought by the Benesse Corporation and given over to contemporary artists to use as showcases for original works of art. The people who check the visitors' tickets at the entry to each of these houses are mostly,I'm guessing, long term residents of the village, and they seem to have a very friendly relationship with the mostly young, urban visitors. One old woman solemnly gave me directions on how to find some of the other places, but her solemn demeanour broke when she pointed on the map to the most post-modern of the houses: she said something that she clearly expected me to understand even though she knew I spoke no Japanese and burst into probably derisory laughter.So much for the Japanese-featured Statue of Liberty taking up two floors of a house clad in rusted galvanised iron, with some floors covered in scattered postcards, and some walls completely black.

We sat in total silence and almost total darkness with 12 or so young people in one house, until our eyes could discern a faint rectangle of light at the far end of the long building, when at a given signal we all stood and walked towards the light, in another James Turrell adventure. We sat in semi-darkness beside a pool that took up the entire floor of another, small house, mesmerised by dozens of LED numbers under the water, all counting down from 9 to 0, each at a different rate. We visited a small shrine where a staircase of what looked like ice led from brilliant white stones to the inner shrine, and then, supplied with a torch, we went by a narrow tunnel to the space under the shrine and saw that the stairs continued underground. One tiny house had exquisitely carved wooden magnolias placed on its tatami flooring in a pattern that made me think of the islands of the Inland Sea that surrounds Naoshima.







As it happens, I'm writing this just after reading a piece in the current Heat about the difficulties of art criticism, which makes me feel a lot better about my inability to convey how wonderful this experience was. At least part of it was being in the company of young people who were variously swaggering, giggling, canoodling, as they walked through the village, but invariably silent attentive when in the houses, and mostly willing and able to sit in contemplative silence much longer than we were in any given place.

Satisfying as our couple of hours in the art village had been, we decided to press on and visit the island's other museum, Benesse House. This is a much more conventional art gallery. But with great windows opening out onto the sea, it too casts an extraordinary spell, and many pieces were clearly commissioned specifically for the wall they occupied. I found myself thinking that Gully Jimpson would have loved to be given a wall here. In one tiny, walled courtyard there were two large, smooth, flattish stones, on one of which lay two recumbent human figures, their soft shapes and warm texture playing beautifully off the qualities of the stone. Then one of the figures moved and I realised they were enjoying the art as well as having become, temporarily, part of it. So what could I do, but make my own small contribution to Art on the other stone.



The art here spills out from the gallery: there are any number of intriguing sculptures on the hillsides, cliff faces and beaches nearby, some relating to works inside the gallery. For instance, there's an installation in the gallery consisting of a large painting of a seaside with two small wooden boats, one bright yellow, the other black, on the floor in front of it. Down on the beach, one sees two wooden boats, one yellow, one red, placed in the same relationship to each other as the ones just seen in the gallery.

And there was much more, intoxicatingly much more.

If you're travelling to Japan, do think seriously about putting Naoshima on your itinerary. I just found a write-up on Wikitravel. evidently not all the ryokan on the island will accept non-Japanese, and though the owners of the Minatoya ryokan speak almost no English, they were very welcoming, and you wouldn't be making a mistake to book in there.

Posted: Sun - September 28, 2008 at 09:50 PM           |

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