Page 36 - Seniorstoday August-2023 Issue

large Andy Warhol ‘Flowers’ and Hiroshi praying. Walking back from there towards
Sugimoto’s ‘Time Exposed’, grace the walls. Benesse House, we passed eighty-eight
The dinner focuses on Kaiseki cuisine Buddhas along the side of the road made
made with fresh and local ingredients. from industrial waste. Yayoi Kusuma’s
“Narcissus Garden,” spreading indoors and
outdoors holds us rapt… Contrasts collide
as dynamic landscapes, sleek concrete
structures and evocative artworks share
the same space. Benesse Art Site Naoshima
is an immersive art adventure like no other
that I have experienced.

Naoshima is a famous rural art hub,
and the Art House Project has placed
contemporary artworks inside old wooden
houses, scattered across shrines and rice
fields, in the 16th century fisherman’s
village of Honmura.
The corridors are full of original
contemporary canvasses and eerie light
sculptures projecting classic Japanese
landscapes through the near-dark. In the
Ando designed Chichu Art Museum, are
five major pieces – a set of Monet water
lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting
six feet granite sphere at its centre by the
American land artist Walter de Maria,
and three light installations by James
Turrell. In one of the pieces – Open Field
– we walk into a room flooded with an
unearthly orange light. We climb some
steps, and enter a large room suffused in
soothingly deep blue light. As we turn
around, the people in the room behind
look like artworks. A ten-minute walk
from the Chichu, takes us to a tall, grey,
windowless Ando construction in a field.
Here, the Korean-born Lee Ufan, reveals
his artistic flair and genius. A single rock
placed in front of a great earth-coloured
slab, with a light shining on it, looks
like a moving representation of a figure

34