This week’s dream: enchanting islands of modern art

Attracting a million art pilgrims a year, the remote islands of Naoshima and Teshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea have “an almost mythical status globally”. Formerly polluted by industrial waste, they were rescued in the 1980s by the philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake, who has since worked to regenerate them through art. The result is a “new Arcadia”, says Catherine Fairweather in Porter – two wondrous and uniquely Japanese sanctuaries where sculpture, painting, architecture and the landscape come together in harmony. Fukutake’s vision is of “spirituality without religion”, and the galleries, hotels and cafés he has created have roots in the “minimalism” of Zen and in the veneration of nature at the heart of Shinto, Japan’s pre-buddhist belief system. Wandering among them is all but guaranteed to “shift perspectives, stir the soul and calm the mind”.

Many of the fishermen and chrysanthemum gatherers who once populated Naoshima left years ago; at Honmura port, their homes and workshops have been turned into galleries, inns and libraries. But the island’s pièce de résistance is the Chichu Art Museum, a sort of concrete bunker built into a grassy mound. Open, in part, to the sky, its galleries, corridors and ramps have a wonderfully fluid quality, and centre on a “stunning” mosaic-tiled space housing five of Monet’s giant Water Lilies canvases. Nearby, Tadao Ando’s Benesse House Museum has hotel rooms, each a “paean to simplicity”, and guests are allowed to visit the galleries when the crowds have gone.

On Teshima, visitors can spend their days cycling between art installations on electric bikes, swimming off sandy beaches, exploring “primeval” forests and eating in “sensational” restaurants. Particularly charming is Hotel Lemon, an installation that becomes a tiny hotel by night.