Lyn Bishop : Sharing Secrets

Naoshima is a small island located in Japan’s Inland Sea. In recent years Naoshima has transformed itself from a traditional fishing community into a contemporary art destination that features work by some of the worlds best know artists.

Benesse House Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum holds a collection of commissioned works that has spilled out from the formal museum into the surrounding village. The Museum is both a place for art and a place for people, offering hotel accommodations, fine dining, and art library. Walking the museum corridors after hours or visiting the library in the silence of night makes for an extraordinary experience, and gives the guests a feeling of living with the art, if only for a day or two.

Tadao Ando’s museum architecture reflects and highlights influences from nature; the quality of light, the open space, the sense of the sea, and the earthiness of the surrounding forest. Keeping with the original idea of creating a symbiosis of nature, art and architecture, Ando has created a formal space for art, and in the process allows the artwork to take on it’s own expressive characteristics by giving context and meaning to the architecture as it quietly blends into Naoshima’s unique natural environment.

The site-specific artwork contained in Ando’s architecture takes advantage of the space. Artists choose the locations and install their works accordingly. Take, for example, the work of Jannis Kounellis, who choose a light filled window to install his “Untitled” work made up of hundreds of individual packages of folded lead and driftwood rolled together in a kind of industrial sushi. All have been neatly stacked in front the window, leaving only a small strip unobstructed to the views outside. Or Bruce Nauman’s work “100 Live and Die” which is installed in a dark, cylindrical, cave-like space where the viewer is confronted with their own disturbing emotions associated with themes of life and death as neon lights flash commands patterned after the American slang phrase, “Eat shit and die.” A long list of English verbs, adjectives and nouns are combined with the imperatives “live” and “die.”

At the other end of the island is the village of Honmura. In this area stand old traditional Inland Sea homes that face danger of rotting away. With their traditional tiles and unique outer walls of dark-charred cedar boards, these homes speak of a prosperous history and poetic beauty that is quietly fading away as gentrification and modernity encroach. Today, many of these old homes have been given new life, becoming significant structures in the Art House Project. With the preservation of Japanese culture in mind, the homes are kept in their original form while being remade by an artist and team of craftsmen. As the Art House Project is executed in a real, living town, it has the means to create a dialog about the relationship between art and the local society, and in the process directly involve the people living in the village as an integral part of the redevelopment effort.

The first Art House Project was conceptualized by Tatsuo Miyajima. Miyajima collaborated with the community on his “Sea of Time” installation, asking locals to set the color and the speed in which his LED counters would tick off numbers that forever count from 0-9. The villagers were further asked to participate by placing the LED counters in a body of water that had replaced the traditional flooring in the main room of the house. The resulting effect is one that marries Miyajima’s contemporary aesthetic with the wabi-sabi qualities of the traditional Japanese home.

In addition to the museums (the other being the Chichu Art Museum) and the Art House Projects, the island is filled with site-specific installations scattered about and accessed in a kind of treasure hunt. In Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s “Slag Buddha 88”, eighty eight Buddha statues, created using the slag of industrial waste from nearby Teshima Island stand at the edge of a pond, reflecting their wisdom of the environment into the murky water below as a reminder of the delicate balance between the natural world and it’s human inhabitants.

If you should visit Naoshima, be sure to spend a few days exploring all that the island has to offer. While the area may feel sparse and airy on the surface, attention to detail pays off as nothing is quite as it seems in this community turned art destination.

To get there take JR from Okayama station in Okayama take JR Uno line to Uno Station. Exit the station and walk 2 minutes to Uno Port where you take a ferry to Naoshima Miyanoura Port.

Tags: Art House Project, Benesse, Honmura, Naoshima, Tadao Ando

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Art, Collaboration, Creativity, Culture, Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.