"Living well" on Naoshima: in a spectacular island setting enhanced by two Tadao Ando structures, a Japanese publishing company nurtures an ambitious art-and-architecture program - Report From Japan

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Arden Reed

Imagine a tiny Japanese island where you can encounter works by Walter De Maria, Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat and James Turrell--just for starters--at any time, day or night. The island is Naoshima, and it is sheltered between two of the main islands, Honshu and Shikoku, in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, about 500 miles west of Tokyo. There the Benesse Corporation, working with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, has created a unique environment in which to encounter contemporary art, expanding on such Japanese traditions as harmonizing one's dwelling space and garden, and creating a site for contemplation, rather like a vast enlargement of the tokonoma, a domestic niche that might contain a scroll and a single flower or bamboo stalk.

The Benesse Corporation (or the Fukutake Publishing Company, as it was once called) purchased the southern part of Naoshima in 1987 and three years later hired Ando to design a building that would combine a museum and a hotel. Benesse House opened in 1992 with 10 guestrooms atop a series of galleries. Following two years of temporary exhibitions, starting with "Issey Miyake Twist," the museum began to build a permanent collection. An additional guest residence was constructed in 1995, and the Art House Project, which brings together architects and artists in a program to rehabilitate some of the island's derelict vernacular buildings, was inaugurated in 1997. Late in 2001, Naoshima organized a 10th-anniversary exhibition.

The business that bankrolls this undertaking was founded in 1955 by Tetsuhiko Fukutake, a former teacher who had started a printing company that went bankrupt. Fukutake went on to market correspondence courses and school examination practice tests with great success. In the 1980s and '90s, his company grew into an international corporation, with over $2 billion in sales for the year 2000. Besides owning the Berlitz language schools worldwide, Benesse engages in educational publishing and human-services management, overseeing childcare centers and retirement homes.

In 1995 Fukutake Publishing was renamed Benesse--Latin for "living well"--in order to signal the corporation's commitment to addressing the ills arising from unrestrained development and social fragmentation that have beset Japan since the 1970s. Art was assigned a significant role in that corporate mission, whose declared social agenda sets the Benesse Corporation apart, even in a country where contemporary art has been promoted with substantial business support. Nevertheless, the connection between culture and commerce can look a bit incestuous. For example, Soichiro Fukutake (who became Benesse's president at his father's death in 1986) is the museum's director.

Yuji Akimoto, the 47-year-old chief curator, trained as a painter at Tokyo's National University of Fine Art and, before coming to Naoshima in 1991, worked as an installation artist, freelance curator and writer. Curators of private Japanese museums need persuasive skills to match their eye for art, and such skills Akimoto clearly possesses. He proposes acquisitions to Fukutake, and (whether quickly or over a period of years) he has secured approval, subsequently ratified by the corporate board, for every one. Because its business has largely escaped the economic downturn, the corporation continues to collect, and the cultural enterprise has thrived.

Focus of Benesse's largesse, the 3-square-mile island of Naoshima, with a population of 3,700, has two small ports, a village and an industrial zone where Mitsubishi has long refined copper. Why did the company choose this venue for its activities instead of Tokyo, say, or Okayama, where Benesse is headquartered? For one thing, Naoshima has a romantic past: located along important sea routes, the island played home to pirates who built a castle there and whose traces can still be detected. For another, the land forms part of a national park (its purchase from the Japanese government required an extraordinary dispensation) and offers dazzling views of water, cliffs, coves, wooded isles and passing vessels. Most important, the journey to Naoshima, coupled with Benesse House's isolated setting on it, transports visitors away from prevailing urban tempos. This place is about escape but not escapism, about removal, the better to engage.

Mixing, balancing and blending are the hallmarks of the arts complex; integration is evident at every level of design. Ando built Benesse House into a steep hillside, and much of the structure is underground. Still, enough of his signature polished concrete, paired with rough-hewn marble, emerges to create a strong sculptural presence. And while Benesse House burrows in, it also opens onto generous patios, grand staircases, extensive lawns and the sea beyond. Blurring the boundary between inside and out (an age-old Japanese practice), Ando extended the exterior's polished concrete planes into the museum and installed massive sliding glass doors to expose the interior to changes in weather, time of day and season. The transition from guest rooms to the museum's exhibition areas feels almost seamless, and works by the collection's artists appear in both residence and gallery spaces. Should you, at midnight, say, want a second look at Winston Roeth's mostly monochrome paintings of 1996, you have only to go downstairs.