The first thing you see when the ferry rounds into Miyanoura port is a pumpkin. Yellow, enormous, cheerfully covered in black spots, it sits at the end of a pier with the composure of something that has always been there. It has not. An artist placed it here. The island agreed.
Naoshima chose art the way some places choose fishing, or farming — not as a decoration, but as a way of life. What began in the 1980s as a quiet experiment between a publisher and an island mayor has become one of the stranger destinations in Japan: a fishing village of some three thousand people that happens to contain one of the finest art museums in the world.
The museum in the hill
Chichu Art Museum is underground. Architect Tadao Ando designed it to leave no mark above the hill's surface: all concrete and geometry, cut through with shafts of sky. There is no artificial light. The art waits in natural illumination — different at every hour, different on every overcast day.
On one wall, a room of Monet's water lilies glows in the afternoon sun. On another, a James Turrell installation holds you inside a rectangle of pure colour so long that you begin to lose where the wall ends and the light begins. There is a Japanese word, 間 (ma), for the charged emptiness between things. Chichu is built from it.
Art inside old houses
In Honmura, the old fishing quarter, the Art House Project has taken root in ordinary buildings. You pass through a low doorway and find yourself inside a work by Turrell, or a room floored in water reflecting the ceiling. Outside, the village continues: laundry, a cat on a wall, the smell of something cooking.
This is deliberate. The art is not supposed to separate itself from life. It comes to live with the residents, or next door to them, and the residents carry on. Whether they mind, they politely do not say.
What Ando builds
Tadao Ando uses concrete as other architects use wood: warm in the right light, precise in its pours, made to show the grain of the formwork. Across Naoshima he has left a series of structures that sit into the landscape rather than on it. The Lee Ufan Museum is half-buried in an embankment. Benesse House — a hotel and museum together, perched above the strait — seems to have grown from the rock.
Standing inside one of his buildings, in a shaft of afternoon light, you feel less like a visitor to architecture and more like a small part of it.
Wabi at the water
Dusk on Naoshima arrives without ceremony. The sky goes copper, then rose, then the grey that Japanese aesthetics prize as 侘び (wabi) — the beauty of incompleteness, things worn softly by weather and time. The strait turns still. A single trawler moves without hurry.
You leave not entirely sure what you have seen. A museum, several houses, a pumpkin at the end of a pier. But the island stays with you in the way that places do when they are not performing. It simply is what it is, and allows you to be the same.