This week’s dream: an artistic paradise in rural Japan

Scattered across three islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, Benesse Art Site Naoshima is a “rural art paradise”, says Isabel Choat in The Guardian. Made up of 18 museums and galleries, it’s a hugely ambitious project on a grand scale, founded in the late 1980s when a billionaire businessman, Soichiro Fukutake, decided to reinvent three islands scarred by “rapid industrialisation”. Fukutake’s plan was not only to give Naoshima, Inujima and Teshima an “economic reboot”, but to create an artistic “utopia” in a setting that embraced a “simpler, slower way of life, far removed from ‘monstrous cities’”.

“High on a hill, overlooking the sea”, Naoshima’s main museum is crammed with modern “greats” by everyone from Jean-michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly, but its defining piece is Yayoi Kusama’s giant pumpkin – “a surreal beacon” that greets visitors getting off the ferry from the mainland. There’s also a set of “interlinked, halfburied buildings” housing a collection of Monets, and the kitsch I Love Yu public bathhouse, a “collage of junkyard scrap and neon signs” set against a backdrop of distant islands. There’s enough art on the island “to fill two days”, and yet most people “tick it off on a day trip”, which is “madness”, when there’s also Teshima and Inujima to explore.

On “tiny” Inujima, the main museum was built in an old copper refinery. Entering its mirrored corridors is like “walking through a dream”. Teshima’s art museum is more modern, an “arresting, curved and low-lying” alien structure filled with “nature in its purest form: light, water, air”. There’s much more besides, from “riotous sculpture gardens” to collections of traditional paintings. It can be overwhelming, but the Setouchi Triennale art festival helps to make sense of it all, while showing a “flip side to the frenetic, high-rise, high-tech” image of the Japan we think we know.

The festival (setouchi-artfest.jp) runs 26 April26 May, 19 July-25 August and 28 September-4 November.