Naoshima
On Sunday, two American girls, a Japanese girl and a South African guy set out from Kurashiki to a famous and unusual island in the Seto Inland sea by the name of Naoshima. Megan, Caitlyn and Akiko all work at the same branch of Amity Language School, and had been planning this trip for a while. I was lucky enough to be invited along. Getting to Naoshima entails a short ride on the ferry from Tamano Port. Megan and I opted to spend the trip on the top deck because the cabin was infused wihth the unhappy union of marine diesel and stale cigarette smoke. At first glance, Naoshima looks like a bleak wasteland as a large part of it is taken up by an environmentally unfriendly processing plant owned by Mitsubishi, but the ferry continues around this gloomy headland to a more habitable part of the island where we disembarked.
Naoshima is an anomaly, a kind of playground for Japan's artistic elite. Ignoring the Mitsubishi side of the island, it appears to be like anywhere else in peri-urban Japan with ancient houses and temples existing side by side with more modern structures sprinkled with the ubiquitous vending machines and fading prefab buildings. Take a closer look though, and one notices that within, amidst and hidden behind this apparent banality lie gems of creative expression, turning a visit to this place into a rich treasure hunt for the fantastic, exquisite and bizarre.
After a few tentative forays inland, turning around each time more because of underconfidence in our mapreading abilities than actually being lost, we found the first art house. I was amused that this house, acting as both a gallery and itself a work of modern art, would not look out of place in Khayelitsha or Gugulethu. It's a double-storey structure with a blue room, a black room, a seven meter high Statue of Liberty and a very interesting toilet. One can be forgiven for loitering because the floor is transparent and contains hundreds of little items like old foreign banknotes, bus tickets, coasters, postcards, doodles, scribbles, pin badges and other useless but fascinating stuff. After getting lost for a bit near the harbour, Megan and I found Akiko and Caitlyn in a white room straight out of some Taschen or Conde Nast arthouse mag. We took pictures of each other on the stylish chairs, pretending to be aloof supermodels or self absorbed architects. Even the potplants seemed to be imbued with some kind of ubermode superiority complex. We left this place with a small group of Japanese people and a guide with a strange haircut who closed his eyes when he spoke. He took us to what looked like a conventional traditional Japanese house from the outside, but inside it was dark, and filled with water. We were led along boards around the edge of the main room and we sat with our backs against the wall, staring bemusedly at red, green and orange digital numbers counting from one to nine, turning off, and then starting all over again, at different speeds just beneath the surface of the water. There must have been about fifty of these little units and they were the only lights in the room besides some very faint sunlight that found its way in through the entranceway. I tried unsuccessfully to understand what the guide was saying but later Akiko told me that he had said that the lights represented reincarnation, counting to their limit, going out and then starting all over again. I found it interesting that they all seemed to go at different speeds. We left this dark electronic hydro metaphor room and proceeded to what was once the kitchen. It took me a while to notice that the window also had digital numbers on it, also following the same 1-9 sequence at different speeds. There were three of them, each one about seventy centimetres high, a huge liquid crystal screen, except instead of the usual calculator/cellphone LCD, this was frosted and the numerals were clear rather than black. Seeing this random number generating window inside an ancient Japanese kitchen with an earthen floor and passers-by through the clear numerals was, in a sense, quintissentially Japanese; the juxtaposition of hi-tech and ancient heritage. It was more than that though, but I'm no art critic and I could get lost trying to identify the unfamiliar feelings this unexpected digital kitchen window aroused within me.
After leaving the reincarnating digital numeral house we climbed the 108 (there's that number again) steps to the temple on top of the hill. This was no ordinary temple though. An artist had bought a temple that had fallen into disrepair on the site from the locals who could not afford to maintain it. In its place, he had constructed a modern version with a much crisper aesthetic than the traditional style. It was set inside a huge rectangle of gleaming white rocks, each about the size of a human skull, which is what they were meant to represent. The staircase was made of huge slabs of glass that descended into the rocks. We were led around some trees and off the top of the hill to a concrete passageway going into its side. I could only just walk along it; it was exactly my height and exactly my width. Thank God I have dealt with my claustrophobia issues already because if I hadn't, this place seemed purpose-built to set them off. The passageway ended beneath the temple, revealing that the glass staircase continued beneath the white rocks into a little pool in a cavern below, conducting sunlight from above to illuminate it with a very dim, eerie glow. Caitlyn felt something crawl across her foot and freaked out. The girls all left this place in a hurry and I was left alone underground to contemplate the incomprehensible; the grand old questions of life: What? Why? One of my favourite artists once said that art is not supposed to say anything in particular, it is supposed to create impressions. This super/subterranian temple did just that and I resolved not to try too hard to assign meaning to what this large and obviously very expensive piece of work was telling me. Maybe the stairway to heaven and the stairway to hell are the same stairway? Whatever.
The girls had all prepared some food and we took time out from our surreal wanderings to have a picnic on the harbour wall, watching red gossamer jellyfish swooshing languidly around in water that was surprisingly clear for the Seto. An old man who had lived his whole life on the island wandered past and he decided to tell us how he used to swim to another nearby island as a child and how things had changed over the years.
After lunch we found ourselves at a large black rectangular building, the the work of a famous architect. We were led inside between carefully placed walls which completely sheilded the interior from light, where we were told to wait until we could see a faint rectangle appear in front of us. When we could, we were encouraged to move toward this rectangle and reach out to touch it when it appeared close enough. Before the rectangle appeared, the darkness was total. We saw the same things with our eyes closed as with them open. It was an unfamiliar but strangely comforting feeling. When the rectangle appeared, I could just make out the silhouettes of people moving towards it , yet it was still so dim that it was difficult to determine how many of them there were. I got up, walked toward the rectangle and reached out to it but it was as if my hand was passing though it without any sensation. The dimness had helped to create an optical illusion that made the rectangle appear much closer than it actually was. I reached a barrier before I was able to touch anything, and by this time I had my whole arm beneath what appeared to be the surface of the rectangle.
Our next stop was at an installation in an otherwise normal neighborhood that looked like a stand of large metallic waterlilies as viwed from the bottom of a pond, floating on an invisible surface about four meters from the ground. After so much walking around and getting immersed in sensory abnormalities we were happy to get in the car and relax for a bit as Akiko drove us to another part of the island. We stopped for a bit at a gallery called the Barber's Shop, since that is what it once was, where we saw hundreds of fuzzy octopi piled into a corner, and a huge one sitting in its lounge listening to the radio, its tentacles spread leisurely over the furniture. Naoshima is also famous for its cats, which wander freely around the island. On the way to the other side we saw one which must have been totally wild because it was far away from any of the built up areas. We descended into a pretty bay lined with palm trees and found a pumpkin the size of a small car at the end of the peir. Odd post-modern totem-poles punctuated the lawn we walked (and cartwheeled) across. We came to a small spit of land and found a painting halfway up the cliff. An imposing concrete structure loomed close by. It must have housed something important but no entrance was immediately evident. Akiko found it tucked away to the side and we followed her in. We were a little puzzled to discover that the only internal room in this enormous building was about the size of a two car garage. The only things in this room were two identical and perfectly spherical stones about six feet in diameter. And that was that.
We wandered up the slope to an even more impressive building partly sunk into the hillside. It was called the Benesse Art Site and it was designed by the famous architect Tadao Ando. It housed many works by famous artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. I was able to see one or two modern art orginals that I had only ever seen in text books at high school. The building itself felt like a work of art with its cavernous galleries, sweeping curves and enormous picture windows. The famous neon "100 Live and Die" had a huge gallery all to itself with the most incredible acoustics; better reverb than I've ever been able to achieve with any of my digital instruments. It was dark by the time we left, fatigued and a little awestruck by what the Japanese call "the art island". We saw a tanuki, a kind of raccoon/dog/cat thing that is only found in Japan, on our way out. It was the first time I had ever seen such a creature in the flesh, and I can say the same of the island.
posted by Dylan @ 6:00 PM
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