Chichu Art Museum

Interesting facts

The Monet room floor is made of about 700,000 hand-laid Carrara marble cubes, each two centimetres across, and visitors take off their shoes to cross it.

The museum grew out of the purchase of Monet's six-metre Water-Lily Pond, a work from the same late series as the great panels in the Orangerie in Paris.

In the Monet room the corners are rounded and the walls finished in coarse plaster so that nothing distracts from the paintings.

Daylight in the Monet room is controlled by the height of a dropped ceiling, worked out with scale models and light meters.

Walter De Maria's polished granite sphere rests midway up a broad concrete staircase beneath a rectangular skylight, so its reflections change through the day.

Turrell's Open Field first looks like a flat blue panel on a wall, but visitors climb a few steps and walk right into the glowing space.

The Chichu Garden holds around 200 kinds of plants modelled on those Monet grew at Giverny, including water lilies, willows and irises.

In 2007 the building received the BCS Prize, one of Japan's leading awards for architecture.

Why it is worth it

From the hillside above the Seto Inland Sea, the Chichu Art Museum is almost invisible: only a few geometric openings cut into the ground give it away. Everything else lies beneath the earth, as the name, "art museum in the earth", promises. Inside, several of the galleries are lit by daylight alone, falling through those openings onto the work of just three artists, so that each room changes with the hour, the weather and the season.

The museum was designed by Tadao Ando and opened on 18 July 2004 on the southern part of Naoshima, a small island in Kagawa Prefecture that the Benesse group and its foundation have turned into one of the world's best-known destinations for contemporary art. Ando built it mostly underground so as not to disturb the coastline, using his signature smooth concrete together with steel, glass and wood, and connected the galleries with corridors, ramps and open-air courts where only the sky is visible. Rather than housing a changing collection, the building was conceived around the specific works it holds, so that architecture and art form a single experience.

One room is given to Claude Monet, with five late paintings from the Water Lilies series, the largest of them a diptych of the water-lily pond some six metres wide, all lit only by soft daylight from above. Walter De Maria's Time/Timeless/No Time fills a hall with a granite sphere 2.2 metres across and twenty-seven gilded wooden forms. James Turrell is represented by three works spanning his career, from the projected light piece Afrum, Pale Blue of 1968 to Open Field of 2000 and Open Sky, a room whose ceiling is cut open to the sky. Between the entrance and the museum, the Chichu Garden of about 400 square metres is planted with flowers and trees of the kinds Monet painted or grew in his own garden.

Getting there

The museum is on Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea. The island is reached by ferry; the nearest mainland town is Tamano, about 8 km away, whose port of Uno has crossings to Naoshima, and Takamatsu Airport (TAK) is about 26 km away, with ferries also running from Takamatsu port.

Chichu Art Museum

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia