Tag Archives: Museum

Naoshima, the art island of Japan

The night before we left Yakushima, we met Georg, a young and enthusiastic Swiss architect who was full of praise for Naoshima when we told him we were heading there next. For years now I’ve been building my perfect house in my head, collecting inspiration from designs, materials and nice touches I’ve seen, and I asked Georg’s advice about how best to convey my ideas to an architect, which started a fascinating conversation..

Georg politely explained that I’d be employing the architect to do the design, so it’s far better to think about how I intended to live in the house, and to mention anything that affects the allocation of space, for example, where will I spend most of my time? Is the kitchen more important to me than the lounge? What impression should the house make from the outside?

Naoshima is covered in art, like this giant red pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama that greets you at the ferry terminal

Then we started talking about materials and found we shared what some might call an unhealthy fondness for bare concrete. Georg showed me the works of architects who use concrete in their designs, and specifically those of Japanese architect Tadao Ando who is known for his ‘brutalist’ style of concrete, glass and steel, and I knew I was going to enjoy Naoshima.

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando is self-taught and one of the most famous architects in Japan. He has designed buildings across the world, including Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester (UK), Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum in Texas (USA), and of course, many buildings in Japan such as the Tokyo Skytree, the Omotesando Hills shopping complex and three large museum spaces on Naoshima.

Omotesando Hills shopping complex in Tokyo. One continuous inclining walkway links all the shops. Photo source: Wikipedia

Chichu Art Museum

Built into the top of a hill, the Chichu Art Museum incorporates a number of permanent installations, and is itself a work of art

Chichu Art Museum. Ando's design meant the museum building is all underground. Source: Benesse Art Site Naoshima

Chichu Art Museum. Ando designed the museum to be underground while still making use of natural light. Source: Benesse Art Site Naoshima

We loved the mix of geometry and materials, the long underground entrance corridor of concrete reminded me of the D.T. Suzuki zen museum in Kanazawa, and ended with a square, open air staircase whose bannister concealed the stairs so from the ground it just looked like a large square atrium. After climbing the stairs, another long open air corridor ends with a triangular courtyard which we descended to access the gallery spaces.

The triangular courtyard of the ChiChu musem. This one has stones at the bottom, the square one had long grass

We thought it worth visiting just for the museum building, but there are site specific installations by 3 artists, including a stunning off-white room of natural light built specifically for 5 of Monet’s Water Lilly series paintings, 2 immersive installations by James Turrell, an American artist who presents light as art, and a large stepped room containing a huge sphere surrounded by various geometric cricket-stumps by Walter De Maria which was Julie’s favourite.

Lee Ufan Museum

The Lee Ufan Museum on Naoshima. Pointy

The Lee Ufan Museum is a small museum, again designed by Ando and again built into the landscape. We liked the contrast – the large open space outside with the huge standing column gave a feeling of openness and accessibility, but this initial feeling is quickly betrayed by the claustrophobic passageway of 18-foot high concrete walls one must traverse before arriving at the museum’s underground entrance. Inside, the journey through the gallery spaces continue the theme of contrast: light then dark, large then small, each carefully planned for the exhibition of one of Lee Ufan’s installation pieces, until the final room.

Medium in size, with natural light, wooden flooring and rounded corners, the final room is juxtaposed with the rest of the museum, a final contrast if you will, and it invites contemplation because it’s designed as a mediation space. I really liked this – a dedicated space where you are encouraged to sit for a while and reflect on the art and architecture you’ve just experienced.

Lee Ufan – Shadow of Stone. Source: kamel mennour

Of the artwork, I enjoyed the mix of Lee’s work – the large abstract block paintings of the ‘Encounter’ room (entitled ‘From Point’ and ‘From Line’), and the ‘Shadow of Stone’ piece where a video was projected into the shadow of a knee-high stone was captivating for both its content and execution.

Benesse House Museum

Benesse House Museum. Source: Benesse House

The original museum project of the island, the Benesse House Museum is part of the larger Benesse complex that also includes an exclusive hotel, park and a beach. While still incorporating permanent artwork installations such as the Oval (which, sadly, is only open to guests of the hotel), the Benesse Museum is more of a conventional contemporary exhibition space.

Benesse House Museum - Some of our favourite pieces from the exhibition. Yukinori Yanagi 'The World Flag Ant Farm' (source: Benesse Art House Site); Bruce Nauman '100 Live and Die'; Yoshihiro Suda 'Weeds' (source: Big in Japan)

Benesse House Museum – Some of our favourite pieces from the exhibition. Yukinori Yanagi ‘The World Flag Ant Farm’ (source: Benesse House); Bruce Nauman ‘100 Live and Die’; Yoshihiro Suda ‘Weeds’ (source: Big in Japan)

Our favourites were the wall of country flags made from painted sand and joined up into a giant ant-farm, which meant the ants had completely destroyed some of the flags (we tried to identify as many as we could!); the flashing neon wall of words and the very cute piece by Yoshihiro Suda called ‘Weeds’, which look like small weeds growing out of the building itself!

Art House Project

Minamidera, houses my favourite exhibit of Naoshima – ‘Backside of the Moon’ by James Turrell. Photo source: The Unhatched Egg blog

The Art House Project is a collection of regular dwellings that had been abandoned, and were subsequently turned into art installations. A single ticket buys entrance to all 6 of them, and it was fun to cycle between them, as they’re all located in the small port town of Honmura.

We’d spent most of our day at the bigger museums, but we had just enough time to quickly visit each house. On the advice of the ticket staff, we made a beeline for the Ando designed Minamidera, as entrance was limited by number and to 15 minute blocks – which immediately piqued our interest – that and it was built for another James Turrell installation..

While we waited for our turn, we zipped off to see the others before returning for what would be my favourite single exhibit of the island.

Haisha, the ‘scrapbook’ art house

Julie really liked the crazy Haisha, which is aptly described as a ‘scrapbook’ and includes a giant plastic statue of liberty, and we both really liked Kadoya with its pool of submerged LED numbers counting down at different speeds.

Finally, Minamidera. We were led into the short end of the building by a handrail because it’s an installation in the dark. Once in, we sit down and are advised to wait about 10 minutes for our eyes to adjust.

10 minutes later, we can now make out two faint lights at either side of the other end of the room, and between them we were asked if we could see the screen – an empty rectangle of grey that looks like a cinema screen. Once we were all able to see it, I was expecting a show to start, and thinking that the show had already begun, I started seeing little stars move across the screen..

Then we were asked to stand up and approach it. What I thought had been stars were actually the blood vessels in my eyeballs, and as we got to the screen we found it was completely uniform in colour. Then came the surprise.

I’d love to tell you what happened next, but this one is better when you experience it for yourself :)

Us with another of Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkins

We thoroughly enjoyed the art and architecture-packed day on Naoshima, but as each museum charges around ¥1,000 (~£6) for entry (or ¥2,000 for Chichu), we spent ¥5,000 (~£30) each, and that doesn’t include lunch, bicycle hire, or the round-trip ferry to get there. Yep, it was an expensive day on our budget, but it was definitely worth it!

Museum Meiji-mura, Japan

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You wouldn’t think that just a week after visiting the Hida Folk Village in Takayama we’d want to go to another museum preserving old buildings, but this one has a very different focus from any of the other outdoor museums that we’ve been to. Meiji-mura doesn’t focus on traditional wooden architecture but examples from Japan’s Meiji Era (1868 – 1912). This period marked an opening of Japan to foreigners and the architecture is notable for combining Western and Japanese elements. For example, the Principal’s Official Residence of Peers’ School is effectively split down the middle with European style office and reception rooms on one side with high ceilings and wide staircases, and Japanese style family rooms on the other with tatami floors and sliding paper doors.

Principal’s Official Residence: European part of the house from the outside, a very Western dining room, a traditional Japanese room on the other side of the house

The museum contains more than sixty buildings with a huge diversity of original uses, from churches, shops and houses to prisons, a theatre and a lighthouse. Despite the grey weather and drizzly rain that arrived in the afternoon we really enjoyed the variety of different buildings and their lakeside location and found that even a full day wasn’t enough to see everything.

Some of the preserved “buildings” are very small such as this sentry box of the Akasaka Palace, and this ornamental lamp from a bridge in front of the Imperial Palace

The imposing St John’s Anglican Church was built in 1907 and originally sited in Kyoto. It’s structure is adapted to withstand earthquakes being brick on the first floor and wooden above with a copper roof.

The interior of St John’s Church is split into two levels with a hall downstairs for Sunday school and the upper level where services were held

The Sapporo telephone exchange building included an exhibit of equipment used in the early days of telephone services in Japan

Some of the museum’s buildings were arranged as a high street

Tomatsu house was a tradesman’s house in Nagoya City. Although it looks fairly small from the front, inside it is a rabbit warren of rooms and passageways. It also contained the coolest stairs we’ve ever seen with drawers hidden in the risers (unfortunately we didn’t get chance to snap a photo). Clockwise from top left: facade, view from an upper floor window, the owner could sit in this room at the top of the atrium and listen to the conversations below, reconstruction of the office at the front of the building.

We really enjoyed the tour around the Kureha-za Theatre which included a chance to sit Japanese-style in one of the audience boxes as well as to walk along the basement passage leading to the area where the revolving part of the stage used to be turned by some very hard-working slaves

Striking a pose on the stage of the Kureha-za Theatre

The stained glass in St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral shone brightly even without much sunshine outside

We met this lovely lady in the rather incongruous setting of the Kanazawa Prison. She helped each of us play a short tune on her koto before searching her music book for something English, Auld Lang Syne was the closest she could find!

One of the highlights of the museum is the magnificent main entrance and lobby of the Imperial Hotel. The Tokyo hotel originally opened in 1890, and this redesign by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright opened in 1923. This portion of the building was moved to Meiji-mura when the hotel was revamped again in the late 1960s.

We treated ourself to afternoon tea in the tearoom of the Imperial Hotel Lobby

Part of the site contains buildings with an industrial history. The Shimbashi Factory of the Japan National Railways where railway carriages were once built now contains a collection of industrial machinery, much of it linked to spinning and weaving.

A drizzly view from the edge of the museum site over Lake Iruka. The structure on the right is all that remains of a Tokyo religious college, its entrance porch.

Highlights of the Hermitage

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Wow, where to start with this vast and amazing museum. The Hermitage is housed across three floors and three buildings in the heart of St Petersburg. You enter from Dvortsovaya Ploschad (Palace Square) into the Winter Palace. This beautiful building, painted green and white, was built for the tsars in the mid 18th century. The museum collections were begun shortly afterwards, in 1764, by Empress Catherine the Great. To give you some idea of the scale of the place, we visited for two longish days (6-7 hours each and we weren’t dawdling) and we could easily have spent another day or two there without covering the same ground twice. The corridors of the museum reputedly add up to something like 20km (about 12.5 miles).

Palace Square and an unexplained military parade on the day of our first visit

Us outside the Winter Palace

The art collections are impressive, but for me the real highlight were the rooms that they were housed in, with carved cornices, chandeliers, ceiling paintings and lots of gilding. There are also a number of state rooms open to the public. These are mostly on the first floor and also include rooms furnished in styles from different periods, e.g. Art Nouveau or Roccoco.

The Jordan staircase – what an entrance!

Ceilings of the Hermitage

The gilded drawing room

Interior details

Lots of gilt and crimson in The Boudoir

Sculptures in the Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting

Italian art in impressive surroundings

A particular highlight for me was the Raphael loggia copied from the gallery in the Vatican which was painted by Raphael and his students between 1517-1519.

The Raphael Loggia

The first floor of the museum is where most people seem to concentrate their visit. As well as the majority of the state rooms, it contains all the ‘Old Masters’ kind of art. Pretty much all European, they have a staggering number of pieces by Rembrandt, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc. There is a small collection of British Art, including some pieces from Wedgwood’s Green Frog Service which was commissioned by Catherine the Great in 1773. There’s also a collection of European medieval art, and a room devoted to armoury.

Triangular Wedgwood dish with a view of Alnwick Castle

Huge Flemish paintings

Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross

Armour for horses

The ground floor of the museum is devoted to antiquities, art from ancient civilisations. Neither of us was particularly interested in seeing these (there are only so many Roman emperors I can look at before I get bored…) but we did have a quick look through some of the rooms which was worthwhile to see the variety of exhibits as well as the different styling of the rooms on this floor.

Room of the Culture and Art of the Hellenistic Era

Ancient artefacts

The top floor of the museum contains 19th and 20th century European art (Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso…) and collections from Asia. We especially liked the collection of Japanese netsuke.

Art student sketching on the top floor

Pieces from the Japanese collection

On our second day at the Hermitage, we opted to take a tour of one of the museum’s treasure rooms. The collection of gold artefacts can only be viewed in a tour group and no photos are allowed. We weren’t very impressed with the tour (especially as it cost us an extra £6 each on top of the museum entry price). Although the group size was not too large (about 15 people), the guide spoke very quickly about each exhibit and moved on to the next almost without drawing breath, not allowing us to either take in what he had said or properly see what he’d just spoken about. It was especially galling as a Russian tour group had gone into the collection 15 minutes before us and were still only halfway round when we were shunted out, so maybe we were just unlucky with our guide. Nevertheless, some of the ancient items were very beautiful and incredibly intricately made and it was worth seeing, if a bit overpriced.

About halfway through our first day, just as we were contemplating a pit stop for a coffee, we spotted a guy winding a grandfather clock and stopped to watch. An older woman who looked like one of the museum stewards approached us (just about every room has an elderly lady standing by to shout at visitors if they get too close to the art, try to take pictures when they’re not supposed to or generally do anything else naughty). She spoke a little English but not a lot and with a certain amount of charades and pointing at our map she made us understand that we should visit room 204 at 7pm at which point she did a strange little dance with flapping arms. What on earth could that possibly mean? Was she going to demonstrate unaided flight? Intrigued, and not having passed through room 204 previously in the day, we made our way there just before the appointed time and were met with a huge crowd:

One of the Hermitage’s more famous artefacts is this magnificent gilded Peacock Clock made by English clockmaker, James Cox, around 1770. The clock part is not very obvious at first glance, but two dials situated on a ‘mushroom’ at the base count the hours and minutes and a rotating dragonfly, sitting on the mushroom, checks off the seconds. Bells signal the hours and quarter hours.

Us with the clock after the crowds had cleared

The clock is in good working order and is kept running all the time, but the mechanism which runs the automated figures (what we were about to witness) is only wound once or twice a month. Enter the man who we had earlier spotted looking after the grandfather clock. He got inside the glass case with clock, wound it up and the show began – the owl’s head turned and its foot lifted, the peacock began to rotate, opening its tail, and finally the cockerel crowed three or four times. We later marvelled at the chain of events that meant we saw the clock in action – our choice of day to visit the museum, spotting the clock man earlier, the kindly and persistent woman who tried really hard to communicate the place and time to us. Do you have any stories of equal serendipity?

If you’d like to see it for yourself, check out this video:

Essential Russian Culture

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Today we decided to fully immerse ourselves in Russian culture and went to a vodka museum and tasting session.

Smiles before trying any vodka

The Russian Vodka Museum has various displays explaining the history of vodka in Russia, how it is made, and lots of different glasses, bottles and labels from through the years. Unfortunately, none of the explanatory signs are in English so we paid the additional price to have a short tour (from the barmaid as it turned out). This was definitely worthwhile and she told us how grains used to be fermented in a big pot before Russians learnt to use proper distillation equipment from travelling in Italy, how Russians got round the two periods of enforced Prohibition in the 20th century (vodka on medical prescription, and home distillation if you were wondering), and why Russians toast any major event with vodka.

Russian Vodka Museum displays

Large glass and picture of sparkling water vending machine from Soviet times

Emperor Peter the Great loved vodka and used to play tricks on his guests. If anyone arrived late for dinner he would make them drink a litre of vodka from a huge glass – like a very extreme version of ‘catch up’. He also liked to wait until his guests were quite drunk and then serve them with plates of red crayfish which would start to move! Instead of cooking them which makes the crayfish turn red (and kills them), they were prepared by steeping in vodka which makes them red and sleepy so that they only began to move after they were served.

After the tour, we had a vodka tasting with 3 different types of vodka (Russian Standard, Gold and Platinum) which were served with 3 different Russian canapés (zakuski) – pickled herring with onion and boiled egg on rye bread, pork fat with horseradish on rye bread, and a pickled cucumber. Our tour guide advised us that vodka should be downed in one gulp, as you get more drunk if you sip it, but I found that was easier said than done and it took me several swigs to empty each glass!

The vodkas used in the tasting

Trying the down-in-one manoeuvre before eating the zakuski

The bar in the museum stocks 220 different kinds of vodka which can be tried if you find that you’ve got a taste for it after the first three. We decided to try a couple of the pricier ones (around £5 for 50ml so still not breaking the bank) to see if we could tell the difference between those and the ones that we’d just tasted. Andrew got the Beluga and I decided to try the Mamont. And the difference? They were both pretty smooth, but we couldn’t really tell them apart and I don’t think they were any better than the Russian Standard Platinum… Underdeveloped tastes at least allow for cheaper drinking!

Our higher end vodkas

Pedvale Sculpture Park, Sabile, Latvia

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Last Thursday, we visited the open-air sculpture museum at Pedvale near Sabile in western Latvia. The morning began with wildlife. On the 1.5 mile walk from the village to the museum a deer crossed the road in front of us and then within minutes of starting to walk around the park, we saw a bullfinch and two different kinds of woodpecker!

I don’t think that they’ve had many (any?) visitors over the winter as the man who runs it seemed slightly flustered to see us and forgot to charge us the entry fee.

The museum is run by Ojars Feldbergs, a Latvian artist, and the permanent collection consists of around 100 sculptures placed over 100 hectares of land. Most of the sculptures are made from natural materials (stone, wood, etc.) but some are made from reclaimed/recycled material. Our favourite was “MUNAMUNA” by Villu Jaanisoo, made from old TV screens.

Another favourite of ours was “Washday” by Liga Zimante. Situated by a stream, it made us smile.

Here are some of the others.

“The Path” by Karlis Alainis

“Butterfly” by Karlis Alainis

“Pedvale Totem No. 14” by Kardo Kosta

“The Makeover” by Liga Zimante

“The Sky Chair” by Villu Jaanisoo

For most of the way, the paths were hidden under snow and in some places it was ankle deep…

We were fortunate to have gorgeous weather on that day. In fact it was so sunny that we both got some colour on our faces. One thing we weren’t expecting to get in Latvia was a tan :)

two year trip

Andrew and Julie's Travelling Adventures

Tag Archives: Museum

Naoshima, the art island of Japan

Tadao Ando

Chichu Art Museum

Lee Ufan Museum

Benesse House Museum

Art House Project

Museum Meiji-mura, Japan

Highlights of the Hermitage

Essential Russian Culture

Pedvale Sculpture Park, Sabile, Latvia