Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Since my visit, the Benesse Art Site has expanded considerably. The museum complex now encompasses nearby Teshima and Inujima Islands and includes three new museums on Naoshima, all designed by Tadao Ando. The Chichu Museum houses five paintings in Monet’s Water Lilies series, as well as work by James Turrell and Walter De Maria; the Lee Ufan Museum is dedicated to the work of the Korean minimalist; and the Ando Museum celebrates the architect. Benesse Art Site continues to commission artists to design its guest rooms. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are currently at work on a double suite. The Teshima Art Museum, an artistic collaboration between artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, opened in 2010 as part of the Benesse expansion. Teshima Island also hosts Christian Boltanski’s project Les Archives du Coeur, and the Teshima Yokoo House, a residence transformed into gallery and exhibition space. Inujima Island, third in the developing archipelago, now has its own museum, located in the remains of a copper refinery; the Seaside Inujima Gallery, featuring the work of Fiona Tan; and the Inujima Art House Project, five gallery spaces created largely of recycled materials. Interviewed by Lee Yulin about the larger Benesse project, its founder said that he had sought to create “an island of dreams for children.”

SOLOMON ISLANDS

Song of Solomons

Travel + Leisure, August 2003

I will admit that part of the lure of the Solomon Islands was the name. When I made the reservations to go, I joked that I was leading a trend in eponymous travel. But I was tempted also by the sense that in its obscurity the destination preserved some kind of authenticity, whatever authenticity is. My second day there, I went to board a local flight and found that it had been canceled and that I’d have to go a day later. When I asked what the problem was, the desk clerk explained that the pilot had converted that morning to Seventh-day Adventism and could no longer fly on the Sabbath.

Among the fantasies I have always harbored is one of the South Seas. While some people who dream of this corner of the world want lavish Tahitian resorts, I wanted desert islands untouched by the ravages of modernity and sky-blue seas with only an occasional canoe or school of dolphins to break the surface. I wanted to meet men and women who would be hungry for my news and generous with theirs. I wanted to be something between Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe. I was very young when I first heard of the islands out there that had my name, and I was thrilled to discover that the Solomons were about as remote as anywhere else on earth. I wanted to go; I can’t remember not wanting to. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote that these islands, though charted and explored and visited, remained terra incognita.

The Solomons, just east of Papua New Guinea, are a chain of almost a thousand islands, many tiny, a few quite large, about a third populated. The country covers more than 520,000 square miles of sea and receives about four thousand tourists a year. There are at least a hundred local languages and dialects; the lingua franca is pidgin, though many people speak English because the islands used to be a British protectorate. Traditional life and ceremonies are called custom: custom dances, custom bride prices, custom skull caves, and so on. Missionaries Christianized the islands at the turn of the nineteenth century, and almost everyone attends church services, but Christianity has not supplanted local beliefs and rituals. The Solomon Islands were long notorious for head-hunting and cannibalism, and on my first day in the capital city, Honiara, I stopped in a shop to ask about some pointy objects and found out that they were nose bones—to be worn through a pierced septum.

The islands are perhaps best known in the West as the site of the major World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, in which the native population helped Americans defeat the Japanese who were trying to build an air base there. The country, one of the world’s poorest, has no overclass; subsistence affluence is the rule. Economic and power structures in the Solomons are dominated by the Malaita people, and strife between them and other populations is ongoing, but such violence has on no occasion affected visitors.