At Benesse House on Japan's tranquil Naoshima Island, Aryn Baker finds that life imitates art—or is it the other way around?
TETSUYA MIURA
Yayoi Kusama's 'Pumpkin', one of Benesse's many art pieces, sits on an old wharf extending into the ocean
Benesse House
Take a tour of Naoshima's museum/hotel, where even the rooms are works of art
It was a pumpkin—orange, gigantic, perhaps even monstrous given the black spots that lent it a diseased look—squatting on the edge of a jetty. I had stumbled on a glossy photograph of it; to me, the pumpkin was ripe and sensual, not rotten and unsightly, and so surreal it possessed a magnetic quality. I felt the urge to see it up close, to reach out and touch it. I wanted to ... lick it.
The pumpkin is what drew me to remote Naoshima Island in Japan's Inland Sea. Bucolic Naoshima is home to Benesse House, a unique hybrid of art museum and boutique hotel that's the inspiration of Soichiro Fukutake, president of Benesse Corp.—a publisher of correspondence books for children and the parent company of Berlitz language schools worldwide. Most museums do their artworks a disservice. The crowds, the long lines in front of the latest Pollock on loan from a private collection, the surfeit of visual stimulation that ceases to provide meaning after the third hour, the aching feet at the end of the day—they all add up to an experience that runs counter to one of the reasons I appreciate art: namely to escape myself and plunge into the vision of another. But Benesse (Latin for "live well") gives modern art room to breathe and its supplicants time to contemplate. Featuring the work of a dozen internationally recognized names and a handful of rising Japanese artists, the museum takes a revolutionary approach to displaying its collection.
At Benesse, the art is not rarefied or cordoned off. Sculptures are meant to be touched, paintings mulled over again and again. Here, the guests don't go home at the end of the day; they stay the night. If at midnight you desire to ponder the deeper meaning of Bruce Nauman's blinking neon aphorisms in his 100 Live and Die, you need only wander downstairs, a cup of freshly brewed green tea in hand. And when you wake up in the morning, you eat breakfast under the watchful gaze of a busy Basquiat. "By placing contemporary art among natural beauty, as opposed to a museum in an artificial, big city," says Fukutake, "the art speaks to us more strongly." Like the pumpkin, one of Benesse's scores of exhibits, did to me.
Neither a museum in a hotel, nor a hotel in a museum, Benesse House is a shrine where art is a reverential and interactive experience. Visitors are like pilgrims who stop at secluded monasteries to spend a few days among the devotees, living and eating with them and ultimately taking home a new appreciation of their philosophy. So it's only fitting that internationally acclaimed Japanese architect Tadao Ando, best known for his pared-down places of worship, was chosen to design Benesse House. The self-taught Ando is a sculptor of space. He takes the basic ingredients of his trade—concrete, steel, glass and wood—and creates liquid, organic structures that manipulate light, engage nature and emit a sense of spirituality. Carved out of a rocky headland on the southern tip of the island, Benesse House burrows into the earth, yet opens out onto vast terraces, sun-filled patios and sculpture-flecked lawns. The galleries are lit by well-placed skylights and massive, sliding glass doors. Rough-hewn marble steps lead directly into native brush and trees grow out of atriums cut into rooms. The chapel-like central gallery—a concrete riff on a sacred grove—is crowned by a jutting glass pyramid that pierces the lawn above. It is one of the few parts of the building that can be seen from the sea.
Getting to Naoshima itself requires a sharpening of the soul, a shedding of urban preoccupations. Located six hours by train, boat and bus from the nearest international airport in Osaka, the museum demands a pilgrim's submission to the rigors of journey (though this being Japan, each connection—from high-speed bullet train to the suburban ramble of the regional to a slow-moving ferry peopled by chain-smoking fishermen—is impeccably scheduled). By the time the visitor reaches Naoshima's shores, urban worries have been replaced by Zen-like peace that comes from knowing that in the next few days there will be nothing to do but cherish art, immerse in nature and ponder the intersection of the two.
My room was in the Annex, the second of Ando's structures, built in 1995 to accommodate even more guests. To get there, my host Satoshi Yamamoto, who acts as both docent and concierge, led me to a miniature monorail that would have given Hong Kong's Peak Tram vertigo. The Annex crowns the hill above Benesse House and offers six suites in a circular building surrounding a reflecting pool; doubles start at $210, call (81-87) 892-2030 or go to www.naoshima-is.co.jp for reservations. The walls are painted blue, and the roof is covered with grass and vines that descend down through the atrium. The effect was like walking into a cool blue grotto, until I opened my hotel-room door onto a blindingly broad seascape. There was nothing between me and the dizzying expanse of the Inland Sea but a glass wall.
The transition of museum to guest quarters is seamless. Each of the spare, minimalist rooms shares the same polished concrete walls and pale wood floors of the galleries, and each is graced by a piece of the museum's collection or a commissioned work. My walls featured River Avon Mud Fingerprint Circle executed by British installation artist Richard Long. Some of the other rooms I peeked in featured Keith Haring originals, Christo sketches and one even had a framed lithograph of what I was beginning to refer to as "my pumpkin."
Several of the museum's pieces blur the boundaries between interior and exterior. At the end of the main gallery, through another pair of Ando's massive glass doors, lies Kan Yasuda's The Secret of the Sky, a permanent installation in which two lush and smooth marble forms rest at the bottom of a cube nine meters deep and open to the sky above. Like the Annex, the effect is of walking into a cave only to be confronted by the heavens.
On my way down to dinner that night, I passed the central gallery and was startled when I looked up and discovered what appeared to be tiny plants sprouting from the horizontal seam between two planes of polished concrete descending from the ceiling. I found it reassuring that, even unintentionally, Ando's structure was so well integrated with its environment that the creepers growing on the roof had somehow managed to spread their long tentacles through tiny cracks in the walls. The pale green lobes of the young plants glowed luminously against the gray concrete, lit from some refracted light bouncing off the ceiling. The effect was hauntingly beautiful, and inspired by the artistic pregnancy of the place, I decided that they were in their own way an example of life imitating art.
The dining room may be a museum cafeteria, but there were no rubbery microwaved quiche and paltry, limp greens here. Dinner was an eight-course symphony of form, color, taste and texture. Each course was served on a handcrafted plate or bowl that looked as if it had been commissioned for that dish alone. A roasted tilefish glazed with teriyaki came in a rectangular plate of deep green, while baked scallops with an orange miso caramel and lacy green onions arrived in a rough, unglazed, brown bowl. My favorite, a crispy roll of eel and avocado wrapped in nori and deep-fried like tempura was simply presented on a crimson saucer. And those were the dishes I could identify. As a former chef who takes it as a point of pride to be able to reverse engineer any food that passes my plate, I was at a loss for words—much like my server, whose vocabulary was limited to fish, seafood and avocado when I asked what I was eating.
Still reeling from dinner—or maybe the fine bottle of daiginjo sake—I skipped breakfast the next morning and took a walk through the grounds. Benesse House stands in the middle of a national park, and wooded trails lead from the museum up to the hills or down to the beach. Sculptures from its collection appear unannounced in shady groves. Others look as if they washed ashore. It's hard to tell what's natural or what's designed. Shinro Ohtake's fiber-glass boat fragments, from his Shipyard Works series, are submerged in the sand, overgrown by grass, while a black boat and a yellow boat are anchored in a rocky cove just a 15-minute walk from the Jennifer Bartlett painting of the same subject in the museum.
Later that afternoon I caught the twice-hourly shuttle to Honmura, the main village on Naoshima, population 3,700. In the past, Honmura's heights enabled the ruling Takahara family to scan the Inland Sea for pirates. To this day many of the temples and traditional houses—some of them more than 400 years old—remain in use. Others, abandoned by families seeking better jobs in the big cities, have been converted for another function: some have been restored to their original condition, and a few are being given a new lease of life as art projects.
Tatsuo Miyajima's Sea of Time '98, which made its first appearance in the 1988 Venice Biennale, takes up the entire floor of a 200-year-old house. The foundation has been removed, and in its place is a shallow pool filled with hundreds of digital red, green and yellow counters. Each counter goes from one to nine, then darkens briefly before starting over again. The speeds are all different, set by villagers during the installation ceremony. The only light in the room comes from the glowing counters, refracted and distorted by the rippling waters. The counters, Miyajima says, "Symbolize a single human's time and the brightness of a life. When a counter is dark, it means a person is dead. When a counter is glowing, counting between one and nine, a person is living. Life and death are repeated, symbolized by the glowing counters."
Another art house project, built on the grounds of a former temple, is a modern structure designed by Ando to shelter part of James Turrell's signature Aperture series. Turrell, whose most recent work involves carving out the interior of a crater in the American Southwest, spent several weeks in Naoshima working in tandem with Ando to create a modern temple for his commissioned piece. Just as Ando uses walls to shape space, Turrell crafts form to manipulate light. Naoshima brought them together.
Turrell's Backside of the Moon is housed in a low, modern building constructed of charred cedar in the traditional Japanese manner. At the entrance a large door opens into a darkened passage that immediately ducks around a tall barrier meant to block all outside light. As I navigated the passage, running my fingers along the rough cedar to guide my way, I plunged into an enveloping darkness. I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut. I lost all sense of direction. My fingers led me to a low bench, where I sat down and waited for something to happen. The silence, the darkness and the meditative waiting evoked the spirituality of the former temple. Turrell lets the eyes do the work for his pieces. He forms minute amounts of light that can only be seen when the pupils are fully dilated and adjusted to the darkness. After about 10 minutes a faint glow reached my eyes. I couldn't tell where it was coming from, and when I tried to look at it, it disappeared. Slowly the bundled rays of light came into focus, casting a ghostly blue rectangle on the wall about 10 meters in front of me. I stared at it in awe—the light had been there all along, but it was only by sitting in quiet meditation, eyes open to whatever would happen, that I could see it. Of all of his works in the Aperture series, Backside of the Moon takes the longest to reveal itself. "It takes people a long enough time just to get to Naoshima," Turrell writes in his artist's statement. "So if we take a little more time here, everybody will wait patiently."
All this art had been delicious, but still, it comprised a cultural antipasto. I was ready for my main course and as my shuttle bus turned past a deserted beach, there it was—my pumpkin, just as I had imagined it. From far away it looked like the misshapened progeny of a spotted sea urchin and a gourd. I jumped off the shuttle, and though I wanted to run, I kept my composure—the bus was full of black-clad gallerygoers down from Tokyo for the weekend. The two-meter-high sculpture was designed by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose childhood was haunted by hallucinations of dots covering everything she saw. Her artwork is a reflection of these visions. Slowly I approached the object of my obsession, savoring the absurdity of perching a giant pumpkin on a dock. When I reached the end of the jetty, I circled the sculpture three times, trailing my fingers along its smooth painted surface and the raised, paint-layered black dots. When I reached the end of my third circumambulation I carefully scanned the beach, making sure no one was looking. I leaned in, placing my palms against the orange fiber-glass flesh and laid my tongue against its cracked and peeling surface. I was surprised to find it bitter.
Before departing Naoshima Island after three sublime days, I paused once again at the tiny plants. For me, they had come to symbolize the Benesse doctrine: that only when art and nature are fully integrated can one truly live well. I stared at the plants for a while, committing their lesson to memory, then looked down. At my feet was a small, brass plaque embedded in the concrete floor. "Weeds" it read, "acrylic on wood, 2002, by Yoshihiro Suda." I guess it was art imitating life after all. Or, in the case of Benesse, the perfect union of the two.
