Adventures in Japan

Two Turtle Doves

We got up at 6:30 today, December 26th, and not even for crazy good deals on electronics. Nosir, today we got up early for art. There is an island near here, name of Naoshima, that has been all artified. So we got ourselves on a ferry and got ourselves over to that there island. And Carla didn't get sick. Yay!

We disembarked (saw a sign that read "Thank you for the embarkation of today") and took pictures of the welcome pumpkin.


Then we took a picture of this tree because it reminded Carla of the sad little Christmas tree from the Charlie (not Charlize) Brown Christmas special.


Then we took a picture of them both together.


Then we rented ourselves some bicycles because Carla read on some blog or in a travel book that bikes were the best way to get around the island. Here's something that you may not know: blogs and travel books lie!

It wasn't as bad as that, I guess, but there were a lot of hills and wind-y roads.

Our first stop, at the top of a hill, was a museum. The Chichu Art Museum. Chi means land and chu means middle or in. This huge space contains work by only four artists. And on of the artists is the guy who designed the museum itself. His art is the art space. It was very odd. Very industrial, but built into the hillside in such a way that it blended in beautifully. But the inside seemed kinda prison-ish. All concrete and brushed steel. But then you'd turn a corner and all the angles tilted oddly and it didn't seem so jail-y. The first artist (not counting the architect) whose work we took in was Monet. There was a room devoted to his Water Lilies works.

First, you had to take off your shoes and walk through a room whose tiling and climate made us think of an indoor pool and then you saw the Monet room. It was big, square, and white. Lit entirely with natural light or so we were told. All the corners were rounded and in two of those corners stood gallery employees who just stood there quietly. Judging. Well no, probably not judging, but it felt like they were.

And quiet! It was so quiet! Yet echo-y. It freaked Carla right out.

After spending what felt to be the appropriate amount of time appreciating the Monets, we left.

The Monets? Really quite awesome. Every time I looked at them I saw something new. And the difference between looking at them from across the room and right up close was nutty.

Next up was James Turrell. Never heard of him before. He likes light. Don't we all. His first piece was a cube of blue light projected into a corner. I liked it. The next piece was "Open Field" or, as we took to calling it, "The Blue Room". You walked up some shiny black stairs into a featureless, foggy room lit all in blue. It was very trippy. The next piece was "Open Sky": a small, square room with a very high ceiling with a smaller square cut out of it so the sky could be seen. This day, the sky was very blue.

The last artist on display in this museum was Walter De Maria. His piece was a huge room (it was really, really big!). The room was rectangular and laid out kinda like this: the entrance was on one of the narrow ends of the rectangle, through the entrance was a landing, then a flight of stairs, then another landing, then another landing. In the middle of the middle landing was a massive granite sphere. The sphere was polished to a shiny, shiny sheen. It reflected all the room around it. All around the room around it were placed triptychs of wooden shafts of various polygonal shapes. The wooden shafts were also coated in gold. Shiny. The roof was arched slightly, and the was a rectangle cut out of the roof directly above the sphere. And there was no roof all along the edges of the room. So the room was lit by nothing but natural light. So the room changed appearance every minute of every day. Different angles from the different shafts caught the light and reflected it onto the sphere in the middle.

I really, really, really liked that room, I wish I could've stayed in it and just watched the day go by.

But we had way more art to see.

So we rode to the next museum. No we didn't. We rode up a winding road and then stopped to admire the view of the museum we had supposedly been riding to. The we squealed our brakes down all the way down and backtracked to where we had wanted to go. We stopped off for a very average lunch with a very nice view. There was a lot of art just out and about in this area. We took some pictures.

That is a very wistful pumpkin.

That is a scary cat.


That is both a portrait of Carla and a self-portrait of myself.

There were many other bits of art all around the island but some weren't all that great to look at and some were not all that easy to photograph well. Mainly, I'm just getting tired of typing about art. And we saw lots more. Some good, some great, some not so much.

After the museums and galleries, we went to the art houses. I'd explain, but it's fairly self explanatory: they are art and they are houses. Here's a picture of one of them:


After all that, we rode our bikes back to the dock, parked them, gave back the keys and got on to the ferry back home. Great timing, that.

Once back on the mainland, we hit an Indian restaurant. The night previous I had promised one of the guys who worked there that we would have dinner there tonight. I'm so glad I did, cuz it was freaking awesome!

Speaking of awesome: you know what's awesome? Gyoza. You know what is even more awesome? Gyoza where you replace the regular gyoza wrapping with chicken skin and then deep fry them. So good!

I hope that's it cuz I still have another day to blog about. Vacations are hard work!