Naoshima: An Island Built Around Empty Space

The room is a concrete box open to the sky, and in it is a large stone sphere, and around it, set into the walls, are gilded wooden blocks. That is the whole of Walter De Maria's work at the Chichu Art Museum, and people stand in front of it for a long time. Not because the sphere is doing anything. Because the room is: the light changes as clouds cross the opening above, the sphere's reflection of the doorway shifts as you move, and the space between you and the stone — the empty concrete floor, the stairs, the silence — turns out to be where the work actually is.

Ma (間) is the Japanese word for that. The interval, the gap, the pause that gives everything around it its shape. Naoshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku, has more of it per square kilometre than anywhere I know — and it was, remarkably, built on purpose.

An island that nearly died

Naoshima is about eight kilometres across, with a population of a little over three thousand, most of them in a fishing town on the east coast and a copper-refinery town on the north. Through most of the twentieth century it was a working island, and by the 1980s it was a declining one, its refinery shrinking and its young people leaving for the mainland.

In 1985 the mayor met the president of Benesse, an education company based in nearby Okayama, and they agreed on an idea that sounded, at the time, faintly absurd: to make the island's southern half a place for contemporary art and architecture. The architect Tadao Ando was brought in. The first building, a museum with a hotel inside it, opened in 1992. Over the next three decades the project grew into a whole constellation — museums, installations in old houses, works on beaches — and spread to neighbouring islands, and became the centre of a triennial art festival that draws people from around the world to a stretch of sea most Japanese had never visited.

The strange part is not that it worked. It is what kind of art it turned out to be for.

Ando and the buried museum

Tadao Ando builds in concrete, and he builds with light, and his buildings on Naoshima are almost all below ground. The Chichu Art Museum — chichu means "in the earth" — is entirely buried in a hillside. From above you see openings: a square, a triangle, a rectangle, cut into the grass. You go down into corridors of bare concrete, lit only from the sky, and arrive at rooms that hold, in total, work by three artists.

Three. Claude Monet's late water-lily paintings, in a room of white plaster with a floor of tiny marble cubes, lit by daylight only, so that the paintings change through the day and cannot be seen at all after dusk. James Turrell's light works, one of which is a room you enter to find that its far wall is not a wall but a field of colour with no visible edge. And De Maria's sphere.

A museum of this size elsewhere would hold hundreds of works. The Chichu holds a handful, and the rest of it — most of it — is passage: corridors, courtyards, stairs, the long concrete ramp open to the sky with nothing in it. The building is a machine for producing ma. It slows you, empties you, and then hands you three things to look at with the attention it has cleared.

The house project

On the other side of the island, in the fishing town of Honmura, is the opposite strategy with the same result.

The Art House Project took old, empty houses in the village — a family home, a temple, a shrine, a dentist's — and gave each one to an artist. Nothing was demolished. Tatsuo Miyajima filled the dark interior of a two-hundred-year-old house with a pool of water in which LED counters blink at speeds set by the villagers. Hiroshi Sugimoto rebuilt a Shinto shrine with a glass staircase that descends into an underground chamber and, from the chamber, frames a view of the sea. James Turrell, again, turned a house into a room of total darkness where, after ten minutes of sitting, you begin to see.

The houses are scattered through ordinary streets. You walk from one to the next past people hanging laundry and old men on benches. The art is not separated from the village by a wall or a ticket gate; it is inside it, with the intervals of daily life between. That, too, is ma — the pause between works, which is the town itself.

The pumpkin

There is, of course, the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama's yellow pumpkin with black dots sits on the end of a pier on the south coast, and it is the most photographed object on the island and probably in the whole Inland Sea. It was washed away by a typhoon in 2021 and replaced in 2022, and the replacing was reported as national news.

It is a good pumpkin. But notice where it is: alone, at the end of a pier, with nothing around it but water and sky. Kusama's work is famous for its density — the infinity rooms, the endless dots. On Naoshima she was given, and took, space. One object, and a great deal of nothing, and that is why the photographs work.

What the island teaches

Contemporary art is usually presented as more: more works, more walls, more to see. Naoshima's argument is that the thing you need most, in order to see, is less. Fewer objects. More interval. A long walk between one thing and the next, in which the thing you just saw can finish happening to you.

This is not a Japanese discovery — Western museum designers have been saying it for a century — but it is a Japanese practice, and the vocabulary for it exists here in a way it does not elsewhere. Ma is the reason the tea room is small and empty, the reason the ink painting leaves most of the paper blank, the reason a Noh play has long stretches in which nobody moves. It is the positive value of the gap. Naoshima simply applied it to a museum, and to an island, and let the results show what the concept had been saying all along.

Going

The island is reached by ferry from Uno, on the Okayama side, or from Takamatsu, on the Shikoku side; either crossing is about twenty minutes and is itself part of the experience, the Inland Sea being calm, dotted with islands, and often silver. There are buses on the island, but bicycles — rented at the port — are the right speed.

The Chichu requires timed tickets booked in advance; do not arrive without one. The Benesse House museum can be visited on its own, or you can stay in the hotel inside it and walk the galleries at night when the day visitors have gone. The Art House Project is a single ticket for six houses, and the whole village can be done on foot in an afternoon.

Give it two days. One is not enough, because the whole point is not to hurry, and the island will not reward a schedule.

The sphere

I went back to the De Maria room at the end of the day, when the light was low and the room nearly empty. The sphere had not moved. The gilded blocks had gone from bright to dull as the sun left the opening. A woman sat on the stairs with her hands in her lap, looking at nothing in particular. The space between us was most of the room.

That is what the island is for. Not the sphere, not the pumpkin, not the water lilies. The interval. The gap you cross to get to them, in which — if you let it — something happens that has no name in most languages and one in this one.