The ferry leaves the port with a low shudder, and the island appears first as a dark shape against silver water. Pine grows thick along the ridge, bent by the wind. A concrete wall catches the low light, sharp against the green behind it. On the open deck the air smells of salt, and the Inland Sea lies almost still and pewter grey, broken only by the wake and the white lines of fishing boats moving between the islands.
The art islands of the Seto Inland Sea are Naoshima, Teshima and Inujima, three small islands between Okayama and Takamatsu where museums by Tadao Ando, Ryue Nishizawa and Hiroshi Sambuichi stand among fishing villages, rice terraces and the ruins of a copper refinery. Every visit begins on the water, and the crossing sets the pace for everything after it.
naoshima
Naoshima and the museums of Tadao Ando
Naoshima is the centre of the group, and Tadao Ando is its architect. His buildings there are concrete, shadow and measured light, and they are made to be walked: a wall hides the sea and then gives it back at the turn of a corridor, and a stair draws the visitor down into the hill.
Benesse House Museum opened in 1992 as a museum and a hotel under one roof, its galleries opening onto the sea so that the water becomes part of what is on show. The Chichu Art Museum followed in 2004, built almost entirely underground so that nothing of it competes with the island's skyline. Daylight lights its rooms. Claude Monet's late water lilies are seen by it alone, James Turrell's Open Sky is a square of sky cut into a ceiling, and Walter De Maria's granite sphere sits on a broad flight of steps under light that moves across it through the day.
In 2010 Ando added the Lee Ufan Museum, for the Korean-born artist's stone, iron and painted work. Outside the museums, at the end of an old pier near Benesse House, sits Yayoi Kusama's yellow Pumpkin, spotted black and about two metres high. It was first set there in 1994, and the pumpkin on the pier today is the artist's studio's remaking of it, installed in 2022. With nothing around it but water and pine, it became the best-known image of the islands without a building at all. Its red sister, four metres high and open to step inside, was installed at Miyanoura, the ferry port, in 2006, and is the first thing most arrivals see.
Down in the old village of Honmura, the Art House Project places works inside former houses, on a temple site and at a shrine, so that the art is met in narrow lanes of timber and tile. Ando's concrete on the hill and the wooden village below are an afternoon's walk apart, and Naoshima is only understood with both.
teshima
Teshima and the Teshima Art Museum
Teshima is gentler and more rural, with terraced rice fields and quiet roads running down to the water. The Teshima Art Museum, opened in 2010, is the work of the architect Ryue Nishizawa and the artist Rei Naito, and it is one of the most complete unions of a building and a work of art anywhere in Japan. Its concrete shell, some forty by sixty metres and a little over four metres at its highest, stands without a single column, low on a hillside above the rice terraces like a drop of water about to fall, with two wide openings to the wind, the light and the sounds outside.
Inside is Naito's Matrix. Water rises from tiny openings in the floor in beads that gather, tremble, join and run with the slope of the concrete, and visitors lower their voices without being asked. There is no route to follow and no label to read.
Elsewhere on Teshima, in a low building of its own on a beach facing the sea, Christian Boltanski's Les Archives du Coeur keeps the recorded heartbeats of thousands of people, gathered at his exhibitions around the world and given a home here in 2010. In one dark room a single bulb pulses in time with one heart after another; in another, a visitor may record their own and add it to the archive.
inujima
Inujima and the copper refinery
Inujima is the smallest of the three, a harbour, a village and a few lanes, crossed on foot in well under an hour. A copper refinery worked there from 1909 until 1919 and then stood empty for nearly ninety years, its brick walls and chimney weathering into ruin.
In April 2008 the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum opened inside the remains. Hiroshi Sambuichi designed it around the refinery's own chimney and brick and ran it on natural energy, the sun and the heat of the earth, and the artist Yukinori Yanagi made the work inside in answer to the site's history. The island keeps its industrial past in plain view, a reminder that the Inland Sea has carried shipping, quarrying and fishing for centuries.
In the village below, the Inujima Art House Project, designed by Kazuyo Sejima with the curator Yuko Hasegawa and opened from 2010, sets small galleries of clear acrylic, aluminium and old roof tile among the village's wooden homes, so that the lanes, the gardens and the sky are reflected in the architecture as visitors walk through.
the sea
The sea between, and the Setouchi Triennale
The sea sets the rhythm of the islands. Ferries, small ports and short walks between the works give each day its pace, and the islands reward a slow one: a day for Naoshima, another for Teshima, and time on the water between them.
The Setouchi Triennale, first held in 2010 and every three years since, brings new commissions to islands across the sea at each edition and has carried their name around the world. The museums and the works described here stand all year.
the journey
Seeing the art islands on a private journey
The Custom Tour of Japan shows the art islands the way collectors see them. On a private journey for one party, on its own dates and from five nights, the night is spent inside the museum at Benesse House, with its galleries to walk after dark, and the crossing between Naoshima and Teshima is made by private yacht.
The journey can begin at Takamatsu, with the islands a short crossing away, and go on to Kyoto and one of the city's great ryokan, with a Tour Director beside the party from the first evening to the last.
