Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The museum has works by about two dozen artists, including Jasper Johns (his 1968 White Alphabets), Bruce Nauman (the giant neon 100 Live and Die), and Cy Twombly (a gorgeous chalklike scribble). There are also commissioned pieces by another dozen or so, including Kan Yasuda (meditative giant disks called Secret of the Sky), Jannis Kounellis (a work of rolled lead and driftwood and ceramics, positioned against a window like some industrial obstruction to the view), David Tremlett (wall paintings), and Richard Long (a stone circle on the floor mirroring a painted circle on the wall). There is in general one work by each artist; taken together, they form a miniature survey of late-twentieth-century art. My particular favorite is a series of photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto that look at first glance like multiple prints of a single ocean view, but are in fact of different oceans. They are hung on the museum’s terrace so that if you sit in one of the chairs provided, the horizons of the photos line up with the actual horizon, and the sea you are gazing at lines up with the seas of the photos. The effect is ineffably magical.

Around the museum, scattered in various outdoor spots, are works and installations by Yayoi Kusama (the giant pumpkin), Alexander Calder (a standing fulcrum mobile that shifts with the wind), Dan Graham (Cylinder Bisected by Plane), and others. You can peruse the catalogue and go on a treasure hunt, but it’s nicer just to walk around, trying to guess who made the various pieces and what they mean, then checking the catalogue to see if you were right and what you missed. I loved Walter De Maria’s giant reflective globes, in which you can see yourself and the whole of this landscape. And there’s Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath: in the early evening, you can lie in a Western-style hot tub filled with medicinal herbs and experience cosmic harmony while you watch the sunset through the filigree shapes of giant scholar’s rocks (the craggy stones that Chinese literati once used to remind themselves of the landscape’s rough splendor).

While you have to find the outdoor installations yourself, you are given a guide to the ones in the town of Honmura. A few old houses there, externally much like all the others, have been restored with special care. Inside you’ll find neither cooking pots nor futons rolled back for the day but, rather, room-size installations known as the Art House Projects. The James Turrell house, restored in collaboration with Ando, mixes traditional, Zen, and modernist elements. You walk into darkness, feel your way to a bench, and sit for at least ten minutes before your eyes are able to discern, glowing out of the void, five rectangles of blue light, a cobalt intensity breaking the blackness and throbbing away from and then closer to you. It’s pure meditation. The Tatsuo Miyajima house is flooded with water, and under the water, numbers in red and green on a series of LEDs change constantly, creating an effect that is eerie and haunting and unbelievably beautiful—at once primitive and futuristic. Visitors tread on a thin walkway around the edge. Several other Art House Projects are under construction.

As you wander through the village to see these installations, stopping also, perhaps, at the town’s two shrines, the locals nod and smile. They like the art in their town; moreover, they seem to like the smartly dressed visitors from Tokyo and New York who have become familiar to them. Unlike many experiences of contemporary art, this one is warm. Here, the intellect, the senses, and the heart all find their satisfactions.