Chichu Art Museum

Tadao Ando’s Chichu Museum represents a welcome return to the intense, small-scale work that first made the Osaka architect famous. In the same vein as his Church of the Light (completed in 1989 in Ibaraki, a suburb of Osaka) and other early projects, this sanctuarylike museum blocks out extraneous visual information and focuses attention on light and sky. Aptly named chichu, or “within the earth,” the new museum is a collection of concrete volumes embedded in a hilly site overlooking Japan’s Inland Sea. Privately owned by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, the building features permanent installations of works by just three artists—Claude Monet, Walter De Maria, and James Turrell—each displayed in a self-contained gallery. The architect bound the galleries together with a labyrinthine sequence of spaces—light and dark, open and closed—serving as both passage and destination. Visitors journey to the museum’s remote island to view the art, but they leave impressed with the powerful impact of Ando’s architecture.

The museum sits on Naoshima, a 3.15-square-mile island southwest of Osaka. Accessible only by boat or ferry, the island is a throwback to another era. At its center, a castle town from the Edo Period (1603–1868) functions as a sleepy hub riddled with narrow streets and wood houses, some of which are now used for art installations. While a copper refinery dating from the Taisho Period (1879–1926) dominates the island’s northern side, Benesse Corporation, a Japanese publisher of educational books and study aids, has been transforming the southern side into a cultural district with the help of Ando and other architects. The company first collaborated with Ando on the Benesse House/Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, a combined gallery and hotel that opened in 1992.

Venturing less than half a mile from Benesse House, visitors approach the 27,700-square-foot, reinforced-concrete Chichu Museum along a ramped walk leading up to an opening in a semidetached concrete wall that slices across the hillside and serves as the building’s entry facade. Once past the threshold, they find that sunlight disappears and a disorienting semidarkness takes over. Devoid of signage and other identifying features, a tunnel-like passageway separates the outside world from the museum’s somber interior and leads to a sunken, square forecourt carpeted with green stalks of scouring rush, a segmented grass distantly related to bamboo. Like most traditional Japanese gardens, this one is for the eyes only. But as the walkway continues, it steps up and wraps around the courtyard perimeter, offering a variety of views of the greenery below. At the top, visitors enter the lobby but have to go outside again to reach the galleries.