Our Adventure in Japan! Day 9 part 2: Naoshima: Chichu Art Museum, Ando Museum, Gokuraku-ji Temple, Lee Ufan Museum, local dinner, the Pumpkin at night

[no gallery]

Dear Family and Friends,

We got into our car and drove to the Chichu Museum. Ando designed the museum for the contemplation of three artists: Claude Monet, Walter de Maria, and James Turrell. We first came to the gardens. The gardens are planted with many of the same flowers and greenery as at Monet’s garden at Giverney, while also keeping a Japanese feel, and includes a pond with water lilies.

I don’t know if this is the same type of cat that Monet had…..it does know how to strike a pose, and I think has 3 legs…..which makes for a beautiful composition…

This is an overhead view of Chichu Museum. It is completely underground and you can see how it is open to the natural light.

The interior walls with the grass are like a living painting/sculpture

You follow a series of walkways to get to the exhibition areas.

I love the play of the rocks against the concrete

The museum was conceived with Monet as the artist holding it thematically together. He is the first Western artist whose subject was the effect of light in the landscape over the course of the time of day, day of the year, and different types of weather. This aligns him with the centrality of light in Ando’s architecture.

The images I am showing of the artworks are not ones that we took. The galleries are too big for our cameras to give a sense of the feeling in the rooms.

The first exhibition room contains five of Monet’s last Water Lily paintings, the culmination of his art. The gallery is entirely naturally lit, and so the paintings change constantly depending on time of day or the state of the weather. How Monet could it be?

The second artist at Chichu is Walter de Maria. de Maria’s work encompasses minimalism, conceptualism, and land art. He is perhaps most famous for his “Lightning Field” in a desert in New Mexico. It comprises 400 stainless steel posts arranged in a 1 mile by 1 kilometer grid. If you get yourself all the way out to this distant desert, and are really lucky, you might get to see it during an actual lightning storm.

This work, “Time Timeless No Time” brings volume into consideration. The 7 1/2 foot sphere sits in the middle of the space, surrounded by gilded geometric columns (in each grouping of three one is three-sided, the others are four-sided, I think. I don’t think any are cylindrical). Again, the lighting is natural. The presence of the shapes evolves with the changing light creating different colors and shadows.

The third artist is James Turrell who just does the most amazing things with light. His work causes our brains to respond to light in a variety of ways from adjusting to the most minimal light that at first seems to be pitch black, to immersion in rooms of saturated colored light where the colors constantly change or where fields of different colors meet each other.

At Chichu Museum, in keeping with the interaction of the underground museum and natural light, the first two pieces incorporate the sky.

“Afrum-Pale Blue” looks like an opening to the sky outside but is in fact a projection of the actual state of the sky on the wall.

“Open Sky”, part of the Skyscape series is a room with the ceiling actually open to the sky. It is a counter point to the previous piece. You sit along the edge of the wall and contemplate the sky. Part of the history of the skyscapes is that Turrell, a Quaker, made open sky rooms for Quaker meeting houses.

The third Turrell piece is from the “Open Field” series.

You walk up the stairs to what looks like a solid wall of color.

However, when you get to the top of the stairs you see you are facing a room of color. The floor slopes down as you make your way into the room.

You become surrounded by saturated colors that are constantly changing. It is really wonderful.

Time to transition back to the outside world

The centering presence of cats is never far away

We are escorted back to the parking lot

This sculpture is really hysterical, as well as thought provoking, because there are no trash cans in Japan. You are responsible for taking any trash you create home with you to dispose of there. That is SUCH a good idea.

We drove to the Northeastern part of the island called the Honmura District. The Art House Project is located here. We did not see a lot of this project, but there is only so much time. We will have to come back.

The Ando Museum (I realize I am being Ando-relentless. You are either going to love him or hate him by the time we leave the islands)

Ando’s description of this project: In the ANDO MUSEUM, I nestled a concrete box within the old minka house. The box has a gently curved ceiling. One of its walls aligns with the main axis of the house and is tilted towards the ridge- beam to generate a feeling of openness that extends dynamically into the space above. Sunlight descends down through the deep space from a skylight opening at the top of the wooden roof. My aim was to create a space that conjures a rich sense of depth despite its small size, where oppositional elements such as the past and present, wood and concrete, and light and shadow clash intensely as they are superimposed against each other.

Model of his church commission in Osaka

Walking to our next destination

Our short walk took us to the Gokuraku-ji Temple, a quietly beautiful place.

We got in our car and drove back toward our home base to the Lee Ufan Museum

Lee was born in Korea but has lived most of his professional life in Japan. He began studying painting in Korea, but on a visit to bring medicine to an ailing uncle in Japan got involved in philosophy, as well as art. He was central to the evolution of the Mono-Ha (School of Things) movement in Japan. He described it this way in 2014: “We believed that the unmade needed to be introduced, rather than something that was made. To give you an example, a rock, a natural stone, is not made, but can be as old as the earth. So in an effort to break away from the conventional way of thinking that concentrated solely on making and look at things anew, we asked: how does bringing in the unmade open up a new dimension of expression and change both the made and the unmade?”

Lee started as a painter before working with the idea of the made versus the unmade. This piece is in between using natural clay that he treats as a canvas.

While some of his paintings are composed of a single brushstroke, this clay piece is a single gesture of his finger firmly stroking the clay. It is so simple and so absorbing to consider where the gesture is placed, the feeling behind the gesture, how much pressure was applied, how the space around it feels, the choice of what clay to use, the texture of the clay, how the signature interacts with the gesture and the composition, and on and on.

His painting process includes the incorporation of his breathing into the action of mark making.

He is most known for his steel and stone sculptures, which create a dialogue between a manufactured material and objects from the natural world. Here he juxtaposes a stone and a metal plate.

I love the steel plate and the large stone facing each other.

I mentioned in an earlier email that I was intimidated at the Okada Museum in Hakone by the “no photography” warnings. Well, despite the same warnings in the Lee Ufan Museum, as well as the presence of guards, we could not resist taking pictures. The guards would really watch us when we first entered rooms, and then kind of walk off. By strategically turning our backs to the guards, we could take pictures.

This stone piece is very cool. In the “created” shadow are projections of nature or people

Transitioning out of the museum

A famous outdoor steel and stone piece

Etsuko wanted us to try as many types of Japanese cuisine as possible. She was really excited we go to a very local small restaurant in Naoshima. It is owned by an older couple and they serve an udon pancake with vegetables and a sauce that we grilled at the table. You won’t find it anywhere else in Japan.