Stairway To Heaven*

9 April 2010
When we were planning this r-t-w trip and we bought a guide book for Japan there was in it a photograph of an art installation by Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi. It was of a beautiful pumpkin, about 2.5 metres high sitting on a beach. It was so idiosyncratic and because of our love of pumpkins (well winter squash actually) we knew that we had to visit the island where it was.

At that point we had never even heard of Kusama Yayoi and the suddenly in one of those synchronistic moments we opened the Guardian Magazine one Saturday and found an article about her and a forthcoming exhibition she was having at the Hayward Gallery. The article told how Kusama Yayoi celebrated her 80th birthday last year and that she is a sculptor, painter, writer, installation artist and performance artist. As a child, when she started to experience the hallucinations from which she has since suffered all her life, her response was to paint polka dots. This motif has remained a central feature of her work, and expresses her feeling of revolving 'in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space’, and her view of herself as 'a dot lost among a million other dots.'
To get to the island from Okayama, which is where we have based ourselves, would mean taking two trains, a ferry and a local minibus in an area where very few people speak English. We thought this might stretch our travelling capabilities but we were willing to give it a go (despite C’s dream that the ferries went on strike and we got stranded there). We got there and back without any problems and had another great day.
The island we visited is called Nao-Shima and is one of numerous islands in the Seto Inland Sea – crossing on the sea on the ferry revealed one island after another, some rising abruptly from the calm waters as extinct volcanoes other far more low lying and always in the distance a dim outline of more. Up until a few years ago Nao-Shima was an island community in decline but in the 1990s the Benesse Corporation (a large Japanese publishing company) employed the Japanese architect, Ando Tadao to build a modern art gallery – Benesse House, which is in a prime location overlooking the Inland Sea. The galleries are built in site-cast concrete and are very spacious and include some stunning works by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Richard Long with a huge neon light installation ‘100 Live and Die’ by Bruce Nauman’ which sits in a large concrete cylinder at the entrance – we sat entranced by it. Outside on the hillside and the beach are 17 installations including the aforementioned pumpkin (we were not disappointed by seeing it in real life) as well as some of Niki de Saint Phalle’s whimsical sculptures whose work we love (we have visited her Giardino dei Tarocchi in Italy a couple of times) plus work by several other installation artists.

After that we climbed up the hill to Chichu Art Museum – another gallery designed by Ando Tadao but this time with no profile above ground level yet still flooded with natural light. Actually it’s not a gallery it’s an “Art Space” and houses very few pieces. It was built primarily to house five of Monet’s Water Lily series and beautiful though they are they almost pale into insignificance compared with those in the Orangery in Paris. The art space is huge but houses only three or four other pieces, visitors are expected to remove their shoes and don Japanese-type slippers (none to fit G’s feet of course) to enter the galleries, cameras have to be put away, mobile phones turned off and all the staff wear white and look like they have just been beamed in from the Clinique counter at Harrods – except they were all wearing unmistakeable Comme Des Garcons perfume – sublime. It was an extraordinary experience but we have to say it is probably the most pretentious place we have ever visited! Visitors walk through corridors of polished concrete and first of all enter a huge cathedral-like space which contains a vast polished granite sphere at the top of a flight of stairs with 27 gilded wooden sculptures arranged around the walls – all looking like huge sets of cricket stumps. The next gallery contains three light sculptures by James Turrell – one of which visitors are allowed to enter eight at a time, climb a vast granite staircase and enter a glowing lightbox where there is no sense of dimension – a weird experience. And finally, the gallery containing the Monet paintings.
On the other side of the island is the fishing village of Honmura which is the base for the ‘Art House Project’. Several of the old wooden houses in the village have been turned into venues for works of modern art. The first one we visited was ‘Minamidera – the darkside of the moon’ – a collaboration between the aforementioned Ando Tadao and James Turrell. Ando designed the building using charred wooden walls that are typical of the village. We were led into a totally black space along with fourteen others and left for about ten minutes during which time our eyes got used to the darkness and we became aware of an enigmatic blue void gradually appearing firstly almost like a Zen brushwork landscape and then filling the whole space in front of us; at this point we were invited to walk forward and ‘touch’ the light. What had originally been an unnerving experience was now great fun. Turrell has a couple of light sculptures in the UK – we shall try and get to see them having experienced his work here. Among the other Art House Projects are ‘Kadoya’ by Miyajima Tatsuo – one of the installations ‘Sea Of Time’ consists of a huge tank of water containing coloured electronic numbers which all change at different speeds and in different colours. Another is ’Haisha’ by Otake Shinro where a house has been patched using a whole variety of found objects and inside is a small version of the Statue of Liberty filling one of the rooms; ‘Gokaisho’ by Suda Yoshihiro displays incredibly realistic wooden sculptures of camellias in tatami rooms; another building with tatami rooms houses incredibly beautiful and minimalist modern screen paintings by Senju Hiroshi.

To visit the last of the projects we had to climb numerous large steps on the side of a steep hill to the shrine of Go-Jinja which has been renovated so that beneath the shrine, deep in the hillside is a chamber which contains a glass staircase; above ground this staircase emerges into the daylight and rises through the shrine to a small altar housed in a building above ground thus unifying the underworld with the earth and the sky into one place. It somehow seemed appropriate that we were ending this holiday in a similar way to how we began it way back in December last year by climbing steps up and down temples.
* unfortunately never recorded by The Smashing Pumpkins