Continuing with our day trip on Naoshima 直島 in the Inland Sea of Japan…
If you are just joining us, you may enjoy reading our earlier posts on Naoshima at: Art & Architecture on Naoshima, Ando Museum, Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery, and Benesse House Museum.
We propose another piece of music by David Sylvian to accompany your reading.
Valley Gallery
Our ticket for the Benesse Art Museum included entrance to the Valley Gallery, one of the latest addition to the site by Tado Ando.
Completed in 2022, the gallery is a small concrete structure with an angular steel roof and a trapezoidal floor plan designed to fit into the landscape. It is half-open to the outside through two slits at the corners.
Installed both outside and inside the gallery is “Narcissus Garden”, a monumental work by Yayoi Kusama 草間 彌生, in addition to her pumpkins on the island. Kusama established herself in the New York avant-garde scene in the 1960s. Her work, spanning paintings, sculptures, and performances, embraced Pop Art and Minimalism.
Narcissus Garden was first exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1966 (!), covering the lawn yard of the Giardini. We attended the Biennale in 2016 and it was really fun; see our posts here and here .
The title of the piece suggests a visual interaction between the spectators and the spheres. According to the gallery leaflet, “The repetition of the reflective balls show the surrounding landscape and spectators makes each of us feel as if we are being unified with nature as a life form and infinitely expanding.”
For me, I(Chris) think the appearance of a large number of reflective balls scattered in a natural landscape is mysterious and surrealistic – the natural organic world invaded by swarms of perfectly-spherical objects.
“What is happening here? Where do the shiny balls come from?”
The seemingly random positions of the spheres across the landscape may lead to an impression that the spheres were spilled onto the land and allowed to roll freely until their momentum is exhausted.
The spheres appear also to float on water challenging the viewers’ initial notion that the spheres are heavy and solid like ball bearings.
The reflections of multiple neighboring spheres on individual spheres appear intriguing as they look like little robots.
Yayoi Kusama’s creations have enjoyed considerable global attention recently. Her “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” are a major reason for her surge in popularity, as these immersive installations, filled with mirrored walls and endless reflections of polka dots and lights, are perfect for the age of Instagram.
We had been to several of her Infinity Mirrored Rooms, first at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in 2015 (see our post here), then at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 2017 (see our post here), and most recently at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Her bold colors and playful patterns can resonate with people of all ages and backgrounds.
Another installation on this site is Slag Buddha 88 (2006) by Tsuyoshi Ozawa. The statues were created using slag, the final reside of industrial waste from a neighboring island – Teshima 豊島. Through this work, we are reminded that heavy industries have been operating on Naoshima and Teshima for many years.
While this gallery is small, its architecture is consistent with other Tadao Ando buildings. It is a neat addition to the collection of exhibition spaces on Naoshima.
One of the museums we did not manage to visit due to time constraints was the Lee Ufan (李禹煥) Museum (also by Ando) which is situated across the road from the Valley Gallery. Well, we have left something to come back to on our next visit.
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