Chichu Art Museum

The collection is small by design: late Water Lilies by Monet, three light works by James Turrell and one environment by Walter De Maria, each housed in a room made for it. Its strength is the match between work and space, not breadth.

Chichu Art Museum opened on 18 July 2004 on the south side of Naoshima, an island in the Seto Inland Sea in Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. Tadao Ando designed it, and the decision that defines it is that most of the building sits underground. The museum's own account gives the reason: the building was placed below ground so that it would not disturb the scenery of the Inland Sea. Ando works mainly in concrete, with steel, glass and wood, and the museum describes the result as very spare.

The name helps. Chichu means underground, and the building is almost wholly subterranean yet still reads as architecture rather than a monument. What a visitor sees from outside is little: a concrete wall at the entrance carrying the museum's name, a forecourt of exposed pebble aggregate and, further on, a lower concrete block with a glazed front facing the sea. The rest is reached by descending.

It belongs to the Fukutake Foundation, a project of the Benesse Corporation, and Soichiro Fukutake, then Benesse's president, is its director. The stated aim of the whole Benesse project on the island is to rethink the relationship between nature and people.

Ando was born in the Osaka area, where he still lives and works. He has no architectural degree and no formal training under a master, and he credits wide reading and study trips to Europe and the United States for his development. In 1995 he was named the eighteenth Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, at the age of 53. The Pritzker's list of his works includes two earlier buildings on Naoshima, the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum of 1992 and its annex of 1995, so Chichu was not his first work on the island.

The museum describes the entire building as a large site-specific artwork, shaped by an exchange of ideas between the artists and the architect. That claim matters for how the place is judged. The three artists were not hung in a finished shell; the rooms were made with them.

The origin of the museum's Monet collection is given by the museum's own archive. Soichiro Fukutake acquired a Water-Lily Pond painting measuring 2 by 6 metres, from the same series as the Grandes Decorations at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, and the team set out to make a place where people could reflect on richness and on what it means to live well. Five late Water Lilies paintings are now shown. The works listed for the museum are Water Lilies of 1914 to 1917, Water Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows of 1916 to 1919, a Water-Lily Pond of 1917 to 1919, and a diptych Water-Lily Pond of about 1915 to 1926 whose two parts each measure 200 by 300 cm.

The room borrows its approach from Monet's own plans for the Grandes Decorations. The paintings are seen in natural light, the walls and frames are white and the corners are rounded so that nothing interrupts the view. The designers built several models, moving from a simple space to two combined spaces and then to an asymmetric merge of two. Design went on after construction had begun: ceiling height and the size of the dropped ceiling decide how much daylight enters, and staff tested this with models on the building site and took light readings at several points.

The materials were chosen to protect the paintings' texture and oil. Coarse plaster covers every wall. The floor is about 700,000 pieces of Bianco Carrara marble from Italy, each 2 cm square with no sharp corners, laid by hand. The museum's archive also states that the room's design sometimes conflicted with Ando's intentions and standards for the museum, and that the team used the results anyway. It does not say which choices or who argued for them, and this page does not guess.

James Turrell is shown with three works from different stages of his career: Afrum (Pale Blue) of 1968, Open Field of 2000 and Open Sky of 2004. For Turrell, in the museum's words, light itself is the artwork. Open Sky can be seen during regular hours. A guide describes Open Field and Open Sky as works in which the sky and the wall seem to merge and the space seems to run on with no sense of perspective.

Walter De Maria's room is one work, Time/Timeless/No Time, completed in 2004 in granite, mahogany, gold leaf and concrete. The museum describes the gallery as conceived entirely as his work, with a sphere 2.2 metres in diameter and 27 gilded wooden geometric forms, lit by daylight from the ceiling so that its appearance changes through the day. One guide describes the sphere as black and the setting as sombre.

On Fridays and Saturdays the museum also runs a Night Program: a 45-minute seated viewing of Open Sky at sunset, limited to 30 people and booked in advance. Visitors are exposed to the outdoor conditions through the opening in the ceiling.

Between the Ticket Center and the museum lies the Chichu Garden. The museum puts it at nearly 200 kinds of flowers and trees of the sort found at Monet's Giverny, including water lilies, willows and irises, and one guide describes a path of about 70 metres through plants Monet favoured. The stated purpose is that bodily experience of the garden should deepen the understanding of Monet's paintings. Wikipedia gives its area as roughly 400 square metres and counts about 150 plant types, figures this page treats as tertiary.

The sequence matters. A visitor arrives through a planted landscape, crosses concrete courtyards open to the sky, goes underground and meets the paintings after having seen the flowers they were made from.

Tickets carry a date and time, and the museum states that once online tickets sell out it does not sell on site that day. Online weekday tickets cost 2,500 JPY, rising to 2,700 JPY on weekends and holidays; on-site prices are 2,800 JPY and 3,000 JPY. Children aged 15 and under enter free.

Photographs, videos and sketches are not allowed inside, fountain pens and ink are discouraged and mobile phones may not be used on the premises. This is why Wikimedia Commons holds photographs of the exterior, courtyards and garden but nothing of the galleries, and why this page carries no gallery plate. Some galleries require removing shoes, so the museum recommends footwear that comes off easily. Food and drink are allowed only in the cafe. Suitcases, umbrellas and tripods go in lockers or to the Ticket Center, and baby carriages are not permitted inside.

Reaching Naoshima is by water. From Takamatsu the ferry to Miyanoura takes about 60 minutes and costs 680 JPY for an adult; from Uno the crossing takes about 20 minutes and costs 370 JPY. The Benesse access page notes that schedules can change, so each operator should be checked before travel.

Writing about the museum is largely admiring. Sara Cirillo, in Juliet Art Magazine in January 2020, praised the island and its commitment to contemporary art, called the Monet room spectacular and almost cinematic and praised the immersive disorientation of Turrell's light. She also set down reservations: reaching the museum is hard, an ideal museum of only three artists is hard to manage, and she questioned whether the De Maria garden works as art or only through its appeal to the viewer.

The Michelin Guide entry calls it a highly unusual, almost troubling site, with few works each in a theatrical setting. That is the nearest thing in the sources to a sceptical framing, and it is a characterisation rather than an attack. No criticism of the institution's governance or collecting was found in the sources read for this page.

Visitors and critics agree on the same things: the building is spare and beautiful, the daylight that reaches the Monet room and the Turrell and De Maria spaces is the real subject, and the experience is calm and close to devotional. The recurring caveats are practical ones: tickets are timed and can sell out, nothing may be photographed and the island is not quick to reach. No rating aggregate could be read for this page, so none is printed.