Teshima Art Museum

The Teshima Art Museum is a single room with no columns, no walls in the usual sense and only one work of art, and it is one of the most moving buildings made in Japan this century. Designed by the architect Ryue Nishizawa together with the artist Rei Naito and opened in 2010, it is a thin concrete shell, about 25 centimetres thick, stretched over an oval floor of roughly 40 by 60 metres and rising no more than about 4.3 metres at its highest. Seen from outside it looks like a pale drop of water just settled on the hillside, low enough to disappear into the slope.

Two large oval openings are cut into the shell, and through them come light, wind, birdsong and sometimes rain. Inside, the room is hushed. Rei Naito's work, Matrix, is almost invisible at first: water springs from the ground throughout the day, gathering into small pools and droplets that wander across the floor. Watching one drop make its way across the room can take a long time, and the space encourages exactly that kind of patience. The experience changes with the hour and the season, as the light through the openings moves and the sounds of the island drift in.

The museum stands on a hilltop of Teshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, at the corner of a terraced rice field that had been abandoned and was brought back into cultivation with local residents as part of the project. It is run by the Benesse foundation, whose art projects are spread across several islands of the Inland Sea.

Getting there

Teshima is reached by ferry. The nearest mainland town is Tamano, about 14 km away, whose Uno Port has ferries to Teshima's Ieura and Karato ports; there are also boats from Takamatsu. The nearest airport is Takamatsu Airport (TAK), about 31 km away. On the island, a bus between Ieura and Karato stops at the museum, which is about a 25-minute uphill walk from Karato Port.