when i first visited naoshima in a mild january in 2003, although you would immediately recognise the house benesse resort / cum hotel / cum art gallery, that would be pretty much all there would be to see. what is now the park resort didn’t exist, and was occupied by a pau (or yurt) glamping site. the museum’s main collection, although it hasn’t grown hugely in the intervening years is nevertheless, significantly larger. the collection has also grown with the developments on nearby teshima island, a huge expansion to the hotel accommodation, with the very welcome addition of a cocktail bar lined with the photography of hiroshi sugimoto and a somewhat inevitable soundtrack of lounge jazz, bossa nova, and discreet trance / electro. all very pleasant.
in addition to the hotel expansion there are two new museum-galleries, housing works by lee ufan a leading korean-japanese master of what has come to be known as mono-ha (a school of korean-japanese-chinese modernist work, akin to both conceptualism and minimalism, and the chichu museum; an underground, tadao ando designed structure housing a small number of artworks.
these supplement the ‘art house’ installations of the small town known as honmura around the island form house benesse.
these images are just a small selection of the images i propose to post in the next week or so.