Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Modern art has its pilgrims. As soon as I could, I went to Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim. I have driven across the desert to visit the Chinati Foundation, set up by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, and I have even dragged myself to Târgu Jiu in southern Romania to see Brâncuşi’s Endless Column. I hope to visit Roden Crater in Arizona, where the light and space artist James Turrell has spent more than twenty years transforming a natural volcano. My most recent such voyage was to Benesse House on Naoshima Island, a spectacular art complex in southern Japan that seems to invite intellectuals on honeymoon, Zen souls seeking tranquil inspiration, and passionate idealists ready for a moment’s quiescence.

To get there, you take a train from any southern Japanese city to the Inland Sea and then board the ferry that plies an archipelago known as the “thousand islands.” This is some of the least developed land in Japan; fishermen live the same way they have lived for hundreds of years—rowing out each morning to try their luck, worshipping at unremarkable yet lovely shrines (which I could see from the ferry’s deck), hanging out their nets to dry overnight.

After about an hour, we reached the island of Naoshima and the simple village of Honmura, where we were met by a driver from Benesse House. As we traversed the island’s scrubby landscape, it was hard not to notice here and there some strangely anomalous things: a gigantic fiberglass pumpkin at the end of a dock, or a forest of carved rocks surrounding a hot tub, or a sort of enormous salad bowl on a brick plinth down by the sea. We ascended a steep incline to find a building so cleverly integrated into the landscape that one could drive by without seeing it. This is Benesse House, the center of the Benesse Island complex, and home to one of the world’s great private art collections.

Tetsuhiko Fukutake, head of Benesse Corporation, a large textbook-publishing company, fantasized about building a museum where he could share his collection with people who genuinely wanted to experience it—but he did not like crowds or ostentation. So he came up with the implausible idea of building his museum on an island in the Inland Sea. After his death in 1986, his son set up a campground furnished with yurts, which is still in use, and recruited one of Japan’s leading architects, Tadao Ando, to design a museum that would incorporate ten guest rooms. Ando visited in the rain, fell in love with the site, and set to work, half carving and half constructing the building into the face of the island. In 1992, the doors of Benesse House opened, and in 1995, the Annex, with an additional six rooms, was completed.

Benesse Island is not just a museum. It is certainly not just a hotel. It is a synthesis of the two. It reminds me of the Buddhist monasteries where, for a small fee, you can stay with the monks to contemplate the world as they do, eating their food and living in graceful seclusion, neither monk nor tourist. The rooms at Benesse Island are not fancy, but they are comfortable and elegant and have good art; mine featured signed Keith Haring works on paper. Each room has a wall of glass, so that nothing seems to lie between you and the sea. Meals are served in a dining room that is part of the museum, and there, too, you are surrounded by art, with a few striking arrangements of flowers always, and more of that amazing view. The food is excellent and complex: meals of many laboriously crafted components, delicate and flavorful, all served in equally well-crafted ceramic dishes.

Tadao Ando’s museum building is a study in simple geometries weighted against one another. The basic structure is a spiral in poured concrete (which seems to be a muted homage to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin), with a rectilinear wing in rough stone that houses the guest rooms. The whole thing is built into the hillside. To reach the Annex, at the top of the hill, you get into a cable car and are carried on an angle up to a wonder of fountains, a great central pool, and a radial arrangement of rooms. The style is powerful but not grand. Below the museum proper are exhibition spaces for large works of art. Part of the place’s charm is that it’s hard to tell where the museum ends and the natural landscape begins. Wild grasses grow uninterrupted over the roof of the building, and art is displayed partly in the museum, partly in semi-museum-spaces, and partly on the open seashore. Benesse is not a place for boundaries.