Bucket-list travel: On Japanese art islands Teshima and Naoshima, I felt the magnetic pull of both human and natural beauty | Canada Voices

A bag of tangerines gleams in the basket of a bike parked outside the Teshima Art Museum, a concrete oval buried in a hillside on Teshima, an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. I ask the cyclist where she bought them and she points up, toward a winding road framed by rice terraces and footpaths.

Our rented e-bikes make short work of the ride up. A wood table tucked in a layby is stacked with tangerine bags sold on the honour system: 20 yen (the equivalent of about $2) dropped into a box. We peel and eat them as we hike up a narrow staircase, pausing to look back at the sea.

It is January, and a glorious sunny day. Only a light wind is blowing in. Ferries zoom between the main islands in the Setouchi region and the mainland, about an hour east of Hiroshima, which is the primary gateway to travel in this part of the country.

While there are an estimated 700 islands here, a handful are world-renowned for transforming themselves into celebrated destinations for modern art fans.

Since 2010 when the first large-scale art festival opened, Teshima and several other nearby islands host the Setouchi Triennale, which brings one million visitors to the museums and the low-rise traditional villages that define these islands.

But after waiting years for the right time to take an extended three-week-plus trip to Japan, aligning with the triennale was an organizational feat too far. So, my partner and I are visiting out of season, and quickly recognize the few tourists also taking advantage of the in-between-festivals lull: European art lovers in colourful wool coats, millennials on short sabbaticals and Japanese families from the mainland on a few days’ break.

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The island of Teshima specializes in small galleries slung around its 18-kilometre circumference, and after descending from the tangerine grove, we set off for an hour-long bike ride to Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives du Coeur installation.

This piece feels like a confrontation. Inside a shipping container painted white, built for the installation, the lights are off. Strobes cut its night. Heartbeats, one after the other, blast on a sound system. Some hearts are steady and strong, others alarmingly syncopated, others have an echo, and still others are so slow they must belong to an Olympic athlete.

Each has been recorded by a visitor to this site or others where Boltanski held recording projects. I think of my mother, whose heart had become unruly. Would a casual visitor hear the trouble in its beat?

Though the installation resembles a dance club, the feeling is a joyless rave. I escape out into the sun of the nearby beach. Several other dazed gallery-goers are beachcombing.

A short ferry ride brings us to the port in Naoshima, home base for the art islands. Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin, an orange and black sculpture installed on the pier, is our beacon.

Naoshima’s economy continues to depend on industrial processing, but the island’s reputation is built on more than a dozen main museums, outdoor installations and homes converted into galleries. The latest is the Naoshima New Museum of Art.

Each of the main constructed museums is a distinct work of art in itself. Most are designed by 84-year-old Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect and winner of the 1995 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

The most impressive is the austere and peaceful Chichu Art Museum, which is primarily underground and shelters five of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies paintings. Visitors slip on dust-free slippers. Walter De Maria’s Time/Timeless/No Time calls visitors to worship at the altar of a giant polished granite sphere set at the top of a long staircase. The only light in the spaces is diffuse, pouring in through skylights to the surface.

And still, none of the man-made sites are as affecting to me as the outdoors, the clear light, the lemon and tangerine trees, the winter flowers by the side of the road, all set against a background of vibrant green trees and the blue sea. Here, these world-renowned museums are only gestures of human creativity in dialogue with the landscape.

We have booked a room at the Benesse House Museum. It’s an all-inclusive concept with a twist: all you can art. The museum is also a hotel, and visitors have the freedom to roam its galleries 24 hours a day, bumping into a Giacometti sculpture here, a Jean-Michel Basquiat or a David Hockney there.

Pride of place is given to the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto. A master photographer and architect, Sugimoto has returned for 50 years to the themes of time, consciousness and the sea.

On our first night, we raise a toast to him at the hotel’s wine bar, sitting at a wooden table he designed from fallen trees that are hundreds of years old.

At 5 a.m., I am completely alone. In the still dark gallery, Sugimoto’s photos, displayed in their own section, seem suspended in time and space – birds and a hyena in a scavenging tableau; a once grand movie theatre now closed and empty; light suffusing an empty, minimalist church.

I make a cappuccino at the café next to the gallery and watch as dawn rises over the horizon. The lights of the mainland grow dim.

Benesse is Latin word play on well-being. While art is central to the hotel’s concept, so is delicious and deeply flavoured food. My art morning ends with breakfast, where I discover a sublime lemon jam. Sweet rather than acidic, the jam is made with lemons from Setouchi region and Benesse House is the only place in the world where you can buy it. Rates for the hotel (with breakfast) start at $300 a night.

On our last morning, we visit the outdoor area of Lee Ufan Museum, a collaboration between Ando and Korean artist Lee Ufan. It features Lee’s massive sculptures dropped into a valley, surrounded by waving reeds and the sea beyond.

At the centre of the valley sits a strip of steel bent into a half-circle, Porte vers l’infini, beckoning the visitor to pass through its portal.

I imagine all the creatures who have made their way onto this land: mollusks, dinosaurs, sailors. The steel portal makes visible what I have felt during this journey – a magnetic pull to explore more of its magic. I want to step through the arc, stay here a while. But my world’s heartbeats pull me back toward the ferry and the return to the mainland.

If you go

The next edition of the Setouchi Triennale is scheduled for 2028, but visiting outside festival years is quieter. Most of the works remain on display year-round, along with permanent exhibitions such as Monet’s Lilies. Annual maintenance closings take place in mid-January. The art site’s central website is comprehensive.

Take time to visit the towns on Naoshima. Cafés and resident-run galleries are around each corner, including Art Island Center, featuring work from local artists as well as workshops, and delicious coffee at tiny café Hifumiyo.

The fastest way to reach Naoshima is by bus from the Okayama bus terminal (leave time for lunch in the mall) to Uno Port, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride on a modern passenger ferry to Naoshima or Teshima. A motorcycle or car can be useful on Naoshima, but public and Benesse shuttles make frequent runs around the entire art circuit. Allow a minimum of two days to see most of the sites, three or four for relaxed exploration. Airbnbs should be booked several months ahead.