On a tree-dotted hill on Naoshima, an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, a museum was being completed, with construction equipment on hand and workers finishing their day.
Opening Saturday, the Naoshima New Museum of Art, a concrete structure by Tadao Ando, has a few unusual touches for a building by this Pritzker Prize-winning architect. There’s a pebbly wall along the walkway to the entrance. To harmonize with the townscape, it has a black plaster exterior, exhibition spaces that are largely underground, and a single story above, topped by a sloped metal roof. The iridescent sea is visible from the top floor.
The museum is the latest star in the constellation of more than three dozen museums and projects called Benesse Art Site Naoshima, which spread across three islands. The New Museum is the first to focus exclusively on contemporary Asian art.
And it is likely to provide more fuel for global art pilgrims — some six million of them since 2004 — who have flocked to the islands, most taking a couple of trains and a ferry to experience major artworks in unusual settings.
Some of the Benesse installations are set into the landscape, while others are placed in what look like normal houses in a village, hidden in plain sight.
Tucked into the woods on Naoshima (which only has around 3,000 residents) is Ando’s Chichu Art Museum, which holds five of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings as well as works by Walter De Maria and James Turrell.
The Benesse program officially began in 1992 with the Benesse House Museum on Naoshima, an Ando-designed hotel-museum filled with name-brand art by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yayoi Kusama’s much-photographed sculpture of a yellow pumpkin with black polka dots sits on a nearby pier.
The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang — who has a gallery to himself in the new museum — said that Benesse was “a great example of how nature and culture can fuse. The islands themselves are the artwork.”
The Naoshima New Museum of Art is the 10th Benesse structure designed by Ando in an unusually long and fertile collaboration between architect and client, the Japanese billionaire Soichiro Fukutake, 79, via the Fukutake Foundation and Benesse Holdings, his family’s education and health care services company. (It was recently acquired by EQT AB, a Swedish private equity firm; Fukutake is now an honorary adviser.) The company, with roots back to the 1950s, made its first fortune on publishing student guides and holding simulated exams.
The museum represents a culmination of sorts for Fukutake’s personal involvement. Speaking through a translator on a video call, he called it “the last project that I’ll oversee from beginning to end.”
The opening presentation, “From the Origin to the Future,” features work by a dozen Asian artists and collectives, including the popular Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Thailand’s Pannaphan Yodmanee and Sanitas Pradittasnee.
The majority of the works are newly commissioned, and all are now part of Benesse’s collection.
Cai’s gallery features the large 2006 installation “Head On,” with 99 wolf sculptures in an arc, hurling themselves at a glass wall.
“Visible walls are easy to dismantle, but invisible ones are difficult to dismantle,” Cai, who is based in New York, said of the work. It was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bank and later acquired by Fukutake.
“Mr. Fukutake realized that ‘Head On’ was not just about Germany, but about humanity,” Cai said.
The Korean artist Do Ho Suh — who lives in London and has a survey of his work currently on view at Tate Modern — also has a dedicated gallery at the Naoshima New Museum.
Fukutake commissioned Suh to make one of his signature room-sized fabric works, which became the 16-foot-long installation “Hub, 759 Naoshima-cho, Kagawa-gun, Kagawa, Japan” (2025). Suh visited four homes on Naoshima and chose to replicate the dimensions of a narrow corridor in one house.
“I needed to get to know people and spend some time in the spaces,” Suh said. “They really welcomed me and unpacked their personal stories of living in the homes.”
As a collector, Fukutake has always followed his instinct about artists in a big way; a fan of Lee Ufan’s art, he established the Lee Ufan Museum, in another Ando building, in 2010.
Cai recalled that Fukutake once gave him a Le Corbusier-designed table as a gift and told him, “‘You can keep working at this table. You have grown so much.’”
Having decided to hand the reins to his son, Hideaki, 48, Fukutake reflected on the more than 30-year project.
“I wanted to create a kind of utopia in this world, one where people could genuinely find happiness through contemporary art,” he said of Benesse, which began with a conversation that his father, Tetsuhiko, had with Naoshima’s mayor, in the 1980s, about ways to improve the island, which had been scarred by industrial waste and pollution. The name Benesse is a version of the Latin words for well (“bene”) and being (“esse”).
Visits to the Dia Art Foundation, particularly Dia Beacon, and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside Copenhagen, informed Fukutake’s vision, he said.
The Fukutake family is originally from Okayama, the nearest large mainland city. Fukutake moved to the Auckland, New Zealand, area in 2009 to avoid Japan’s earthquakes and its taxes.
“Under Japan’s tax system, it would be nearly impossible to sustain the activities on Naoshima for the next 200 to 300 years,” he said.
Asked how much he had spent on the entire Benesse project, Fukutake replied, “It’s equivalent to just one or two moderately tall buildings in central Tokyo, which is not a big deal at all.”
He added, “When we started collecting contemporary art, it was still inexpensive — it hadn’t yet become a target for investment. And land on Naoshima was unbelievably cheap back then.”
He estimated his costs for building the museums, including art, at 20 to 30 billion yen (around $200 million) and added that the current value would be closer to the equivalent of half a billion dollars.
Despite moving from Japan, Fukutake has been directing his art collecting and philanthropy more and more toward Asia, and the Naoshima New Museum of Art is part of that shift. In 2010 he established the popular Setouchi Triennale on the Benesse islands.
The Naoshima New Museum will slowly rotate some exhibitions, in contrast to its permanent installations.
“We had to think of the repeaters now — people who like the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, and want to come back once a year,” said Akiko Miki, the new museum’s director and international artistic director of Benesse.
Ando, based in Osaka, has employed the austere-but-rich concrete that made him famous, shot through with dramatic openings for sunlight to pour in, and the twists in the design all have a specific purpose.
“On the entrance-facing side, we used black plaster as a subtle reference to the local tradition of charred cedar facades (yakisugi), which give many homes in the area their deep black tone,” Ando said in an email.
Explaining the boundary wall along a walkway leading up to the entrance, with a rough, pebbly surface, Ando, 83, said its texture and presence was inspired by “a modest example I had long admired elsewhere on the island.”
He added, “This project offered the opportunity to borrow from that quiet vernacular and weave it into the language of the new museum.”
Ando said that the decades-long collaboration was a surprise to him. “Looking back, what I find most fascinating is that these 10 buildings were not developed through any preconceived master plan,” he said. “Rather, they emerged organically, growing and multiplying like living organisms.”
Picking Ando to design a large portion of his passion project was simple, Fukutake said.
“In overly decorative architecture, art loses its vitality,” he said. “Mr. Ando’s architecture is different — it doesn’t overwhelm the art.”
As for wrapping up his Benesse involvement, Fukutake sounded matter-of-fact. “I’ve been fortunate to do what I love and pursue meaningful work,” he said. “I feel fulfilled — there’s nothing I regret or leave unfinished in life.”
He added, “Now, I just hope I can pass away peacefully when the time comes.”
The post The Billionaire Behind Japan’s Art Islands Has One Final Jewel in His Crown appeared first on New York Times.
