In March last year, Maria Fernanda Cardoso flew from Sydney to Tokyo with her husband. They took a 10-hour flight, then a second hour-long flight, and then were driven to a town called Suzu at the tip of Ishikawa Prefecture, where they spent four days researching the area.
The artist flew home and put together a proposal for a new work. She told her producer in Japan that she needed tens of thousands of pine cones. No problem, came the reply. By the time she returned six months later, volunteers from Suzu had collected and processed 38,000 pine cones and seed pods from caltrop and camellia plants for “Seed Pod Time Capsule,” which debuted at the Oku-Noto Triennale in September. The volunteers were so gung-ho and organized that Cardoso finished the installation five days early. She took a few days off to drive around the mountains of Niigata Prefecture to see some art.
Cardoso was one of a handful artists who’d been flown to Japan to create site-specific artworks in a region facing rapid depopulation. But the third Oku-Noto, whose second edition had cost about half a billion yen, was imperiled even before it began: In May 2023, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake hit off the coast of Ishikawa, delaying the opening by three weeks. The festival ran from Sept. 23 to Nov. 12 and brought in 51,000 people.
Seven weeks later, the Noto Peninsula was razed. On Jan. 1, 2024, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake ripped through the region, the strongest to hit mainland Japan since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. The slogan for Oku-Noto, an “art festival at the farthest reaches,” now read like an omen.
The Oko-Noto Triennale is one of several large-scale art festivals in Japan that are, by design, difficult to get to. “Inconvenient art,” as I’ve come to call this movement, is usually placed far from any major city or shinkansen station. Getting to the art sites requires a great deal of patience and logistical precision, a bit of money and a lot of time. Against the odds, they’ve gained mainstream status.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Glass tea house 'Mondrian'” sits in the Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery: Time Corridors space on Naoshima and provides a serene view of the art island’s natural surroundings. | LANCE HENDERSTEIN
The most well-known of these art pilgrimages is the one to Naoshima, in an area known to many simply as “the art islands,” in the Seto Inland Sea. Works by household names (in certain privileged neighborhoods, anyway) such as James Turrell and Walter de Maria, not to mention a few Monets, live on the Kagawa Prefecture island in buildings designed by renowned architect Tadao Ando.
The holiest of rituals on this pilgrimage is taking a selfie with Yayoi Kusama’s “Pumpkin.” Shiny and yellow with black spots, the 2-meter-high and 2.5-meter-wide sculpture was installed in 1994 on a pier on the southern side of the island, set against the backdrop of the sea. In August 2021, a video circulated on Twitter (now X) of the usually chipper work under siege from a typhoon, the sea water battering it on all sides as trees framing the scene lashed about ominously. “Naoshima. The morning’s pumpkin. Waves are crazy,” read the caption. An hour later, the prized pumpkin was gone, swallowed by the storm. The pier sat naked until a replacement pumpkin was installed in October 2022.
In the year that the work was missing, the island was faced with an existential crisis: Without its most important symbol, what was all that inconvenience for?
These projects are not without their risks: financial, logistical and existential. The Noto quake left 75,000 homes destroyed or damaged, and killed 244 people. Around 8,000 people are still living in evacuation centers as the region tries to get back on its feet. Half of the permanent Oku-Noto works sustained damage, and the future of the festival remains unknown. The peninsula’s harsh and constantly shifting weather, and its dwindling citizenry — at just under 13,000, Suzu’s population is half what it was in 1988 — make it easy to imagine an eerie scene from its future: Scant people, only contemporary sculptures worn down by time and rain.
Passengers mill around on a ferry to Naoshima island. To see some of Japan’s best pieces of contemporary art, you have to master a combination of trains, ferries and buses to reach your destination. | LANCE HENDERSTEIN
These large-scale projects are impractical and vulnerable. They also buck conventional wisdom of how the art industry works.
In her book on classical Japanese travel literature, “Travels with a Writing Brush,” Meredith McKinney writes that during the Heian Period (796-1185) “an understandable distaste for travel was heavily reinforced by the firm conviction that the Capital (present-day Kyoto), as it was generally called, was really the only place for a civilized person to be. ... The Capital was the central site of culture, and the land beyond its borders quickly shaded off into the cultural equivalent of ‘the wilds.’”
This passage about Heian Kyoto could easily apply to the New York, Paris or London art scenes of today. Art concentrates in the cultural capitals of the world because that’s where it gets sold. In Tokyo, galleries converge in Ginza, Shibuya and Roppongi. And there’s a swell of new urban art fairs in the city: booths crowd together in dense mazes so that collectors can have easy, efficient access to new artists and works instead of having to brave multiple train rides across the sprawling city.
Japanese art museums favor blockbuster exhibitions — large-scale shows of big-name crowd-pleasers — which often require a great number of paintings to be shipped in from Europe. The works need to be carefully lit and kept in climate-controlled conditions, and are often heavily patrolled by staff policing photography and visitor behavior.
But the founders of Japan’s inconvenient art movement seek to challenge the urban monopoly on art, and in their success they’ve radically changed the way culture is consumed in contemporary Japan. A few influential men have decided to put art where, by many accounts, it simply doesn’t belong, large installations by celebrity artists left unmanned to weather the elements — or succumb to them. Eschewing convenience for sprawl and smoothness for struggle, the inconvenient art movement teaches people a different way to travel in Japan.
Naoshima
I’m something of an inconvenient-art obsessive. My very first time visiting Japan was a decade ago this year. On that trip, equipped with neither phone data nor Japanese skills, I headed from Tokyo to Naoshima.
To complete one of the original pilgrimages of the contemporary art world, you must eschew Japan’s august convenience completely. You must be willing to sweat, to arrive early to stand in a queue, to trawl PDFs on your phone, to wander abandoned villages looking for signage, to run and catch the ferry or bus, to beg forgiveness of a white-gloved attendant for any number of rule violations.
Like many before me, and surely many after, I was so incredibly moved by that experience that I now unironically tell people the trip changed my life. I was living in New York at the time working as an editor at a video media company, and I had no business writing about art. All the same, I got home and convinced my boss to let me write my first essay about Japan’s inconvenient beauty.
The structures on Naoshima island feature the glass and concrete typical of architect Tadao Ando’s work. | LANCE HENDERSTEIN
In October 2022, I returned to cover the autumn edition of the Setouchi Triennale. As I arrived early for the ferry leaving Takamatsu for the island of Naoshima — adulting! — I rounded the bend and ran into a line snaking through and around the ticket center. The ferry was still headed toward the port, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to board. I checked the dizzying grid of numbers and lines that was the boat schedule. The next ferry I could take would arrive at Miyanoura port on Naoshima at 9:06 a.m. The bus I needed to catch from there departed at 9:05 a.m. I was sweating as I waited for impenetrable websites to load. After 10 years in the pursuit of inconvenient art, this should have been predictable.
For most of the 20th century, Naoshima was a heavy industry town. In 1917, Mitsubishi Mining Refinery (now Mitsubishi Materials) opened a large-scale copper refinery on the island’s north side, bringing in new jobs and inhabitants. The economy flourished. In 1955, during Japan’s postwar baby boom, the population peaked at 7,500 — more than double what it is today. By the 1960s, half of the working population of Naoshima was in manufacturing.
But factory emissions became a problem. According to Carolin Funck and Nan Chang, researchers of art revitalization projects in Japan, refineries were moved to the Setouchi islands in the first place because they caused heavy pollution.
Naoshima’s soil was hard, and agriculture was difficult to sustain. Then there was the smell. Food was imported from the mainland, but the water supply came from the island’s own groundwater, which was tainted with a sulfuric smell. According to one apocryphal island story, Chikatsugu Miyake, who served as mayor of Naoshima from 1959 to 1995, invited the mayor of Tamano for tea. Tamano was in Okayama Prefecture, physically closer to Naoshima than the closest cities of Kagawa, but in a different jurisdiction. After drinking the rank tea, however, the visiting mayor found himself cutting a deal to send Okayama’s water to Kagawa’s citizens.
A photo from 1985 shows Fukutake Publishing founder Tetsuhiko Fukutake (left) and Naoshima Mayor Chikatsugu Miyake making plans for a children’s cultural center. Years later, the island would become one of Japan’s most important cultural destinations. | COURTESY OF BENESSE HOUSE
Miyake would play an outsize role in shaping the future of Naoshima. Known locally as Shinren, he was also priest of the island’s main shrine. In 1985, he and Tetsuhiko Fukutake, founder of Fukutake Publishing (today the billion-dollar corporation Benesse Holdings), met on a stretch of beach on the south side of the island. In photos, they squint against the sun in relaxed ’80s suits, making plans to turn the area into a cultural center for children. After Fukutake died unexpectedly, his son, Soichiro, returned to Okayama from Tokyo to take over the business. In 1988, Soichiro Fukutake met 47-year-old Ando, still seven years away from winning the Pritzker Prize, at an izakaya (Japanese pub), cementing the future of the art islands.
After Naoshima International Camp was completed in 1989, Fukutake turned to his growing interest in art. Being from a publishing family, he was impressed by the power of fine art, whose value, unlike books or music, rested on originals rather than on mass copying and distribution.
(In the 1990s, the decade before the first iPhone hit the market, Fukutake was yet to see the crucial role that copying and distribution would someday play in the popularity of his art center.)
Ando began designing the first of Benesse’s art museums, but immediately ran into logistical problems. Since the land was designated as a national park, the laws required any construction of a museum to be accompanied by some form of accommodation. Ando proposed adding guest rooms, laying the foundation for the now famous luxury art hotel. Next, he had to contend with roofs. Custom stipulated that any lodgings adhere to the sloped roofs of traditional Japanese inns — a major clash with the style of the architect, who uses glass, steel and concrete almost exclusively. Instead, Ando constructed the building directly into the terrain. The roofs appear to have been lifted away all together.
Architect Tadao Ando and Benesse Holdings Chairman Soichiro Fukutake speak to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in 2013. The two met at a Japanese pub and paired up to turn Naoshima into a major global destination for art. | BLOOMBERG
In 1998, Fukutake attended the hit show “Monet in the 20th Century” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where a 2-by-6-meter “Water Lilies” painting caught his eye. “It called to me: ‘Buy me. Keep me near you,’” he writes in “Naoshima Setouchi Āto no Rakuen” (“Naoshima Setouchi Art Paradise”), laughing at himself. So, he did what any other billionaire-to-be would do: He bought the Monet. In 2004, Fukutake opened Chichu Art Museum, an underground building designed by Ando. It houses just a few permanent works, including the Monet, and installations by Turrell and de Maria.
People took notice. Tourism to Naoshima, which had remained steady since the opening of Benesse House, jumped, nearly doubling in Chichu’s first year and doubling again by 2007.
Today, the art islands may actually be changing the way Japanese art is regarded worldwide. Last year saw a sudden surge in interest among global art collectors in acquiring work from Japan, something that hasn’t been seen in the industry since the postwar decades. Previously, collectors from abroad would mainly stop in Tokyo and Kyoto on visits to the country. But as a Roppongi gallerist recently told me, Naoshima has become an essential stop on any Japan art trip, and he believes that exposure to nature, history and culture in the remote and lesser-known parts of the country could be fueling a burgeoning interest among collectors and genuinely moving the needle on the business of contemporary Japanese art.
Niigata
Some 650 kilometers away, in the mountains of Honshu’s western coast, the fourth impresario of Japan’s inconvenient art movement was born in 1946. Niigata’s Fram Kitagawa, named “Furamu” by his father after the Norwegian word for “progress,” founded Art Front Gallery in 1982. The son not of a publishing corporate executive but an expelled member of the Communist Party, Kitagawa organized “Apartheid Non!” International Art Festival in the late 1980s, a traveling event that toured 194 sites in Japan.
Around the year 2000, Kitagawa found himself inside the 3-kilometer-wide Roden Crater in Arizona with Turrell, one of the world’s most recognizable inconvenient artists, who had purchased it to create a massive land artwork (which to this day remains incomplete). Lying on their backs, the two discussed the sea, the sky, baseball. Kitagawa recalled the image of Turrell in the snowy mountains of Niigata, having drank a considerable amount of sake, as he searched for a place to build a work for Kitagawa’s new project. In 2000, the first Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale opened with site-specific works including installations by Turrell and Marina Abramovic that people could stay in overnight.
The Echigo-Tsumari Triennale is the brainchild of Fram Kitagawa. The event became such a boon for tourism that governments across the country would seek him out to work his magic for their regions, too. | MAO YAMAMOTO
The festival was designed as a revitalization project to instill pride among the citizens; to bring in tourism; to boost the local economy; and to encourage young people to relocate to the rapidly depopulating region.
“What I was thinking is that if the elderly men and women there want to die in the place where they have lived their lives,” Kitagawa said in a 2009 interview, “I would like to support that desire and help make their days as enjoyable as possible until that day comes if I can.”
The first Echigo-Tsumari festival was by no means a runaway hit. The locals were disgruntled by the elites swooping in. The works were too far away from Tokyo, and too far away from each other. Hardly anyone showed up at the opening ceremony. The local mayors called up Kitagawa. “It’s not too late,” they said. “Why don’t you try and gather as many pieces as you can in one place?”
But Kitagawa wanted something different. He sought “the charm of inefficient and sweaty art exhibitions,” as he writes in his book, “Hiraku Bijutsu” (“Open Art”).
There were times Kitagawa was tasked with guarding works himself. Some days only one group came, and he laid down on the ground to nap. When visitors did finally show up, there were a lot of complaints — “It’s humid.” “There’s not enough signage.”
Eschewing the comfort of Tokyo’s air-conditioned museums, the inconvenient art movement draws viewers into the countryside to see artworks such as Christian Boltanski’s “Les Regards.” | THU-HUONG HA
Niigata has intensely humid summers and can get up to nine meters of snow in winter. The artworks are half in the wild, dotting the countryside. They’re remarkably hard to navigate even with a car and a smartphone, and often require parking in the middle of some overgrown brush and craning your neck until something — is that art? — comes into focus. In Tokyo art museums, there’s air conditioning. There are signs and captions. The art is all in one building. “In short, it was the first time people were encountering such an inconvenient, sweaty and tiring art exhibit,” Kitagawa writes.
Eventually his approach won some fans. It turned out, people appreciated all that stress. “Rather than a place to get art information, Echigo-Tsumari is becoming more like a pilgrimage guided by works of art,” he writes.
The triennale was the first of what would become Kitagawa’s signature model; seeing the success of the festival, local governments across Japan took notice and proposed that Kitagawa come wave his revitalization wand in their regions. And in 2006, after the third Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Kitagawa got a call from a very familiar publishing magnate.
Today, the art director has his hands full: He runs a festival in Setouchi that expands outward from Naoshima; Oku-Noto Triennale wrapped last year just in time for Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale to start in July this year; and before that finishes Kitagawa will open the Northern Alps Art Festival in the peaks of Nagano Prefecture in the fall.
Noto
In September last year, I flew from Tokyo to the city of Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, on one of two daily flights out of Haneda Airport. After Haneda, the squat Noto Airport terminal had the quaintness of a small-town bus station.
On the press tour for Oku-Noto Triennale, I looked out the window of a bus bound for the town of Suzu, on the tip of the peninsula, scanning for works of art in the blur. The tour staff, run out of Kitagawa’s Art Front Gallery, were ceaselessly flowing fonts of knowledge about the region. “Are you from Noto?” I asked the especially cheerful young man giving the tour. “No, I’m from Kansai!” he chirped. “The rice harvest is in late August, early September,” he continued over the mic.
Suzu roofs are very often black, we were informed, rather than blue or brown as seen in other parts of the country, a holdover from the days when the town was full of tile factories that used the hard local clay. Residents love festivals, we were told; come September and October, one can be found somewhere in the town nearly every day. The waters around Suzu have two faces, we learned: the peaceful inner coast, which faces mainland Honshu, and the rough coast that faces the Sea of Japan. I was no longer surprised that a Kitagawa art event turned out to be mostly a lesson on local weather.
Visiting the Seto Inland Sea's so-called art islands means you're going to have to master the ferry system at one point. | LANCE HENDERSTEIN
The press were taken on a parade of meals meant to be tied together by a local theme. The restaurants across town, unable to agree on a concept, decided on “salt.” Most of the salt we eat comes from rocks, but sea salt, produced by the evaporation of seawater, is still made in the coastal regions of Japan, including Noto.
Ten kilometers from where I’d eat salt ice cream the next day, we stopped at a former nursery school in Kodomari. Inside was Motoi Yamamoto’s monument to Ishikawa salt, “A Path of Memories.” In a room painted azure blue on the ceiling and all sides, a platform jutted out, a dock leading out to the sea. But the water of this sea had been sucked dry: The ground was made up of rows and rows of salt, bright, clean and snowy white against the dark walls. The lines of salt were raked with an obsessive evenness like sand in a Zen garden, which typically evokes the ocean. A great sloping structure in the center of the installation looked like a crumbling brick wall, both brittle and delicate, like it could have been ruined with the force of just one curious child. It had taken volunteers 50 days over five months to complete, and had survived the May 2023 earthquake.
Motoi Yamamoto’s “A Path of Memories” stands in tribute to one of Noto Peninsula’s main products: salt. Unfortunately, the piece was destroyed during the Jan. 1, 2024, earthquake that hit the region. | THU-HUONG HA
Just then an actual toddler wandered in and made a break for the salt. “I want to touch it!” she screeched and lunged forward. Dressed in frilly white socks, white puffed sleeves and a white sun bonnet, the picture of a runaway flower girl who’d dodged her wedding duties, she bent her knees to jump. It seemed to happen in slow motion. “Watch out!” one of her adults yelled, catching her just as she was gathering up enough force to jump onto the salt, to the relieved and nervous laughter of the lookers-on.
A day later, the press tour ended. I was staying an extra day to revisit some of the works for my story, and as I watched the tour bus roll away I realized I was stranded with no car, no shuttle, no helpful walking encyclopedia. I managed to wrangle a reservation the next day in a shared taxi whose specific function seemed to be rounding up confused out-of-towners who needed to get to the airport on the other side of the peninsula.
I ended up canceling the taxi, though. I got a ride with Caroline Watanabe, a potter who runs English classes in town. We’re from the same state in the U.S., but she’d been living in a village on the peninsula with only a dozen or so families for over 30 years. Ruby, her Dalmatian, was circling in the back seat as we squinted against the sun slipping down the September sky. I was running late. We were racing to see a work and then get to the airport in Wajima. “This always happens to me,” Watanabe said. “I’m so bad with time.” “Me too,” I murmured as I zoomed around Google maps trying to locate the artwork near the rock that looks like Godzilla.
Faig Ahmed’s “Door to Yourself,” a glittering torii gate, brings a touch of magic to the Noto Peninsula. | THU-HUONG HA
It came into view: the space between the road and the sea opened until it revealed on the beach a sparkling torii gate, Faig Ahmed’s “Door to Yourself.” Its surface glittered and rippled as the light hit its mirrored surfaces. People stopped their cars, headed down to the wet sand, sidestepping pools of sea water and the lapping ocean’s edges, a little queue forming of people hoping to take selfies under the gate. Alien sounds came from somewhere on the artwork, moans that grew with the wind.
Several artists I had spoken to over the weekend, who had come from India, Colombia and Spain, among others, all noted the same thing: These kinds of projects may only be possible in a place like Japan, where public artworks are at a low risk of theft, graffiti and vandalism. But Japan, of course, is itself under constant risk of geological threat. In January, a week after the earthquake that hit Noto, Yamamoto posted on social media that his salt tower had collapsed.
Criss-crossings of potential
Did we have to come so far, traverse so much land and time, all the way to the extreme rugged ends of the country, to arrive here? “The journey is the destination”; or “the real treasure was the friends we made along the way”: I could have saved readers a lot of time by beginning with these throw-pillow platitudes.
But not everyone is wired for such efficiency.
There is a school of literary criticism called reader-response theory that emphasizes active and, crucially, ongoing participation on the part of the reader in making meaning out of literature. Reading is often seen as the reader extracting something from a text, but it’s actually a “constructive, selective process over time in a particular context,” the pedagogy and literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt (whom I’ve written about before in relation to another inconvenient artwork) writes in “Literature as Exploration” in 1938. She calls it a “give-and-take,” a “to-and-fro spiral.”
I have found very little corresponding theory in visual art, which is surprising because, in many ways, art is more subjective. Inconvenient art does even more to bring out rich and fruitful transactions between the viewer and the work. With all its stress and obstacles, its bad weather and tangents, its knots and missed chances, art pilgrimages generate millions more threads and criss-crossings of potential. Perhaps I’m being too liberal with Rosenblatt’s theory, but I think that’s really the art of inconvenience.
Whether it's hiking up Japan's mountain trails, traveling through fields or navigating your way down a village road with no Wi-Fi, the destination is usually worth it. | LANCE HENDERSTEIN
Looking back on that first trip to Naoshima, long before this kind of art took hold as a personal obsession and in turn became part of my livelihood, it’s the destination I remember: On neighboring Teshima island, the astonishing collaboration between the art of Rei Naito and architecture of Ryue Nishizawa, a white dome with circular cutouts that make a sky of the ceiling, water rising continuously in beads from the ground. It was a work I found so hard to tear away from that once I did, pedaling back to the port on my electric bicycle to be early for the ferry, I stopped halfway and turned back, parked my bike at the museum and re-entered. I still remember the feeling of sprinting for the ferry later, the hot shame as I watched it pull away from the port without me.
Hours later, having gone the most roundabout sea route possible to retrieve my bag from a locker on Naoshima, I was sweating at Osaka Station, trying to figure out how to reach my parents’ cellphones from a Japanese pay phone without any coins. My mother asked me why I was going to be so late for dinner. I didn’t know how to explain. “I took the long way around,” I said finally.