Naoshima, a tiny island surrounded by a handful of even tinier islands, is home to around 3,000 people. It is part of the Setonaikai National Park — along with 3,000 other islands in the Seto Inland Sea — with residents mainly clustered along the belt of the island that separates north from south. Mitsubishi Materials dominates industry on Naoshima, operating a smelter and refinery on the northern half of the island, processing over 100,000 tons of electronic waste on an annual basis. But it is the southwest side of the island that has made it a globally-recognised name, drawing an average of 300,000 visitors from all over the world each year. They come for the contemporary artworks and museums that dot this side of the island, so many that Naoshima, along with a handful of others, have earned the appellation of “art island.”
The idea of an “art island” is a curious one. It takes vision, determination, and investment. The existence of all the art on Naoshima is the result of decades of planning, years spent securing the cooperation of a wide net of stakeholders, and most importantly, access to near-unfettered amounts of wealth and capital. While Naoshima's transformation into an art island is widely attributed to Soichiro Fukutake, Japanese billionaire and former chairman of the Benesse Corporation, one would be remiss to discount the efforts of islanders that laid the groundwork for this possibility in the first place.
Background to Naoshima
The origin of Naoshima’s name is unclear, but theories suggest that “nao,” which means “straight” or “honest,” could point to the character of its people or the beauty of the island; alternatively, it might also suggest a place to aim for. Naoshima was certainly a useful landmark for sailors during the Edo period (and perhaps earlier), occupying a strategic place in the Seto Inland Sea along maritime trade routes.
Naoshima is a hilly island covered by granite, its soil hard and largely unsuited to agriculture. Before the twentieth century, industry on the island consisted largely of fishing and salt and seaweed production. Despite the drop in fishing activity from the Meiji period (1868–1912) onwards, some islanders are still involved in fishing today. The village of Honmura on the east side of Naoshima has buildings that date back to the Edo period, with their smoked cedar board walls and ceramic roof tiles. During winter, many still gather to package locally-gathered seaweed for sale.
The dawn of industrialisation in Japan birthed many factories on the mainland, transforming much of the coastline along the Seto Inland Sea. Mitsubishi Materials set up their large-scale copper smelter and refinery in 1917, in response to industry demand. This was a double-edged sword for Naoshima. In the first place, these refineries were moved to here (and other islands in the Inland Sea) because of the pollution caused by sulphurous acid gas emissions. Factory jobs brought (and continue to bring) a certain level of affluence to Naoshima, but also damaged the trees on the island. Later on, Mitsubishi Materials expanded their remit to waste recycling, specifically processing toxic waste illegally dumped on Teshima into slag, and extracting metals from electronic waste.
How Naoshima became an “art island”
The near-mythical story goes like this: In 1985, Tetsuhiko Fukutake, founder of Fukutake Publishing Co., met Chikatsugu Miyake, the mayor of Naoshima, to discuss plans for redeveloping the south side of the island. His son Soichiro took over the project shortly after his father’s death that same year, purchasing a swathe of land in 1987 and building the Naoshima International Camp in 1989, which was initially a cultural and educational facility for children. This was the foundation for the Benesse Art Site, the present collective name for the corporations’ art projects across Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima. Renowned architect Tadao Ando was commissioned to design the first site, and would go on to design ten more, the most recent one slated to open its doors on 31 May 2025.
In this story, Naoshima the art island is largely the product of Fukutake’s wealth and vision. But the groundwork for this had begun decades earlier. Chikatsugu Miyake (known as Shinren) had already been working with architect Kazuhiro Ishii to design new elementary and middle schools. These were part of his ambitious rezoning plans that relocated the schools to a central “cultural” corridor that bisected the island from east to west, and separated the “economic” zone (where Mitsubishi Materials operated) from the south side where the tourism zone would eventually be located. Islanders were encouraged to participate in creative projects as a means of preserving the landscape and generating income.
According to yet another story (likely apocryphal but also rooted in some truth), Shinren had also cut a deal with the mayor of Tamano, Okayama Prefecture, to build a pipeline and send fresh water to the island by serving him tea made from local groundwater, which was tainted with a rank sulphuric odour due to pollution from the refineries. Local actors had already been implementing radical changes on the island. All this is to say that Naoshima (and by extension the other art islands) is not solely the product of outsider intervention, and that it would be remiss to attribute this success entirely to billionaire wealth.
Naoshima today
Naoshima hosts an impressive collection of museums, galleries, and outdoor installations. Many guides to the island’s artwork exist, so we will highlight a few of the more interesting ones.
Perhaps no outdoor artwork on the island is as famous as Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted yellow pumpkin, which sits at the end of a short pier on the beach near Benesse House. Notably, it was her first pumpkin sculpture designed for display outside (with the location in mind), and was first installed in 1994. It was swept away to sea by Typhoon Lupit in 2021, and replaced in 2022. The image of the yellow pumpkin against the azure sea and sky is virtually synonymous with the island.
Therefore, it is not without irony that the town of Naoshima is not allowed to use this image for tourism purposes without explicit permission from the Benesse Corporation, highlighting an ongoing tension between island residents and external corporate interests. (Readers may also be interested to note that all employees at the Benesse-operated facilities on Naoshima are external hires from the mainland; none of them are Naoshima-born.)
The best of all the Benesse-operated art sites (in the eyes of contemporary art lovers, anyway) may be the Chichu Art Museum. Its name, which translates to “Underground Art Museum,” is self-explanatory, as Ando designed the elegant subterranean concrete building so as to not blight the landscape.
Opened in 2004, the museum houses a small collection of works by James Turrell, Walter de Maria, and Claude Monet. This may seem a slender offering relative to the ticket price, but is fully worth the trouble as the way each work is displayed imbues them with an almost transcendent quality. The Monet paintings come alive with the natural light filtering into the gallery. The Ando-designed concrete building might be best viewed in full sunlight, the tilted angles and sharp lines coming into stark relief along with the shadows created at every turn.
Of all the sites at the Art House Project in Honmura Village, the most worthwhile one (for this writer) is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Appropriate Proportion, located on the site of an old shrine. The main structure is built in the style of ancient shrines (such as that of Ise Grand Shrine in Mie Prefecture), with a glass staircase surrounded by a courtyard of stones. Full appreciation of this work comes with (paid) entrance to the underground corridor, a classically Sugimoto construction that evokes his other work (for example, the Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa). The glass staircase connects the underground chamber to the world above; light filtering in through the glass gives the space an otherworldly quality.
The least prepossessing of the art sites at the Art House Project (to this writer) is at Minamidera, which houses James Turrell’s Dark Side of the Moon (1997). The work begins in complete darkness. A hazy rectangle emerges on the wall in front of you as your eyes adjust to the light — and that’s it. It is rather disappointing compared to his other artworks at the Chichu Art Museum. It is perhaps profound for anyone experiencing a Turrell for the first time, but gimmicky for those with experience in the contemporary art world. The strident, instruction-heavy guidance by the staff members who shepherd you into the dark hall does little for the experience. On the other hand, this does tend to give people something to have a good laugh/moan about afterwards. (A choice quote from a client we recently guided: “Well, that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”)
The inconvenience of Naoshima’s art
Cultural critic Thu Huong-Ha has written about the “inconvenient art movement” in Japan, where art lovers will travel to remote places with poor transportation links to view contemporary artworks. The popularity of regional art festivals such as the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale and the Setouchi Triennale is testament to the paradoxically alluring quality of art that forces you to go out of your way to experience it. The infrequent buses, the multiple modes of transport, the pilgrimage — all this is the entire point, enriching one’s engagement and meaning-making with the art. In that sense, places like Naoshima and Teshima should be viewed as success stories for rural revitalisation and art tourism.
Some American clients have noted that most of these art sites and installations could not exist in their country. “There’d be laws against this sort of thing,” one said, referring to the lack of accessible features for many of them. Even renovated, old fishing houses do not exactly lend themselves to wheelchairs or ramps without destroying the very features that make them what they are. An artwork like La forêt des murmures on Teshima that asks you to hike up a mountain for 25 minutes in order to view it by nature excludes groups of people. This is not to say that accessibility in art doesn’t matter; obviously it does. But it is a reminder that not all art is for everyone, and sometimes, that’s what gives the artwork meaning. What that meaning is is for the viewer to decide.