Soaking up art in Japan

“So this is what it feels like to be a billionaire art collector,” I said to my husband, John Wessel. “I could get used to this.”

It was 9 p.m., and we were still glowing from a dinner of shabu-shabu -- Mongolian hot pot -- and sake. We slipped out of our bedroom in cotton robes and slippers to spend a few moments in our own private art gallery. We soaked up the tropical colors of our David Hockney, the Ferrari-like bravado of our Frank Stella and the relative restraint of our Jackson Pollock.

Our gallery -- and our home for the night -- was in the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, set on a hilly, wooded island in Japan’s Inland Sea off Okayama, about 500 miles west of Tokyo. I have visited art museums all over the world, but nothing can match the experience of spending the night in one, surrounded by the works of contemporary masters. At 16-room Benesse House hotel on Naoshima Island, I felt as if they all belonged to me, if only for a night.

Hockney lives in Los Angeles, so why go to Japan to see works by him and other Western artists? Because Naoshima offers a unique setting for an intimate encounter with modern art that transcends walls and national barriers.

So two years ago in May, John and I and 12 others on a two-week tour of gardens, art and architecture in Japan took a 50-minute ferry ride from Takamatsu to Naoshima through Japan’s Inland Sea, the ribbon of water between Honshu and Shikoku, two of Japan’s four main islands. The Inland Sea is known for its exquisite Japanese landscape of tiny pine-forested islands floating behind veils of mist. But when we sailed, the mists had cleared, and we exulted in the sea breeze, blue skies, blue water and bright cumulus clouds.

Naoshima is slightly more than 10 miles around; it has two small ports and an industrial area with a copper refinery. But the southern coast has memorable white beaches and cliffs and green wooded hills, and it was here, amid centuries-old farmhouses and a pirate’s castle, that publishing magnate Tetsuhiko Fukutake dreamed of establishing an international summer camp for children. He died in 1986, so his son, Soichiro Fukutake, took over the publishing giant now known as Benesse Corp. (Berlitz International is among its holdings) and realized his father’s vision by buying about 400 acres within the Seto Inland Sea National Park. To add a cultural dimension to the camp, he began to amass a first-class collection of contemporary art and placed the works strategically around the island, melding culture with the tranquillity of nature.

The International Camping Ground opened in 1989 with canvas-topped bungalows and large yurts that serve as economy lodgings today. But the heart of the Naoshima experience is a stay at Benesse House, which opened in 1992. Architect Tadao Ando, who created the recently opened Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed the hotel-museum.

As the ferry approached Naoshima, I caught a glimpse of Benesse House. Ando’s spare box and cylinder emerged from the top of a granite bluff, half fortress, half geological formation.

Art of the unexpected

A van shuttled us from the dock to the historic castle town of Honmura. Here art ambushes the visitor, popping up in unexpected places, interacting with the natural and human environments. Our first such encounter was Tatsuo Miyajima’s “Sea of Time ’98.” I wondered why the modest Japanese farmhouse with a traditional blue-tiled roof had such a pretentious name. I found out as we slipped off our shoes and passed through sliding doors from bright sun into darkness.

Miyajima had hollowed out an abandoned farmhouse and dug out the floor to form a black-bottomed pool. In the rippling, inky water 125 red, yellow and green water-resistant LED digital counters blinked at different rates, some stuttering frantically, others glowing and fading leisurely. We all stared into the blackness, hypnotized by the lights’ silent contrapuntal rhythms.

Next, the van rumbled up the road to another installation, “Backside of the Moon,” done in 1999 by Pasadena native James Turrell, who is known for land installations -- Roden Crater in Arizona’s Painted Desert, for one -- that deal with the effect of light on the human spirit.

As we entered the building, also designed by Ando, our tour leader, Davis Everett, asked us to close our eyes. Each of us grasping the shoulder of the person in front, we formed a nervous, tittering conga line.

Once we were inside he told us to open our eyes. I did, and the world was as black as when I had them shut. “Just wait,” Davis said. “Let your eyes adjust.”

How long? I wondered, clutching John’s hand. There was nothing but blackness, vertigo, cool air, the smell of damp earth. Luckily, there was a bench I could sit on as I silently awaited the unknown. After 10 or 15 minutes some began to detect a faint blue light and were able to make their way around the room. Not me. I was still in the dark. After a while I thought I detected a glow, but I wasn’t sure. John had to guide me back outside, unenlightened.

Finally we were shuttled up the hill to Benesse House. We walked up a long concrete ramp bordered by white marble block walls and through unmarked glass doors that opened onto a small registration desk. After getting our room keys, we turned and found ourselves in the cavernous concrete cylinder that doubles as the hotel lobby and the first gallery of the museum. It contains a single large neon work, “100 Live or Die,” by Bruce Nauman. “Touch and live,” “Smile and die” and 98 other imperatives flashed in the dim gallery.

We followed a spiral ramp upward along the bare 30-foot-high circular wall, arriving at a series of light-filled galleries opening onto large decks that also displayed art. Bold, contemporary works by international superstars such as Hockney, Jasper Johns and Sam Francis dazzled us. Many are large, but they are accorded plenty of space so we could absorb each one individually.

Yukinori Yanagi covered the walls of a small gallery with national flags. Closer inspection revealed them to be ant farms with stripes of colored sand. Was “The World Flag Ant Farm 1990” a political comment or just a way of creating dynamic designs?

We were forced to interact with Jennifer Bartlett’s works, which spill off the canvas and into the gallery. “Yellow and Black Boats” begins as a multi-perspective wall-sized painting of waves rippling toward two small fishing boats and continues with actual boats flopped casually in the middle of the gallery. Opposing that work in location and tone is her nightmarish “Fish and Bread,” a diptych showing loaves and fishes consumed in pillars of fire. Some of the hoops flying about the double painting seem to have landed on the gallery floor.

A member of our tour group, Minna Nathanson, a sculptor from Washington, D.C., hugged herself and sighed. “I feel as if someone has given me a wonderful gift,” she said. “These are not just works by great artists but prime examples of their work. I think this is the finest Pollock I’ve ever seen.”

In the 1950 painting “Black and White Polyptych,” Pollock achieved a dynamic equilibrium of frenzy and calm. His trademark wild drippings are tamed by his use of only black paint and confining the splotches to five rectangles evenly spaced across the canvas, like demon calligraphy on five hanging scrolls.

Decisions, decisions

The gleaming wood floors of the galleries on the upper two stories continued into the wing containing 10 hotel rooms. The guest rooms could have been mistaken for galleries; their white walls sported original artwork, including some commissioned works. (I saw no special security measures at Benesse House, but later I learned that the staff watches carefully over the works.) But the best picture was through the wall-sized window, past the balcony, to the Inland Sea.

Ah, the decisions I had to make: Should I savor the scene from the balcony, the bed or the shower? Yes, a large window in the shower let us look into the bedroom and beyond to the sea. (There are shutters for privacy.) The bathroom included a tub the size of a wading pool and a high-tech toilet with more buttons than the dashboard of a helicopter.

But we couldn’t dawdle over the view: There was an island of art to explore. A monorail ride led to the Annex, an oval ring of hotel rooms at the peak of the hill where part of our group was housed. Each room had a view inward to a central reflecting pool and out toward the sea.

We scampered through woods down trails to several beaches, some tucked into coves, others facing open expanses of sea. Each held a jewel of an artwork. We named one cove Stonehenge for its circle of boulders. Actually, the 1998 work by Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist now based in New York, is called “Cultural Melting Bath” and features rocks imported from China circling a Jacuzzi filled with Chinese medicinal herbs. The human-size limestone rocks with large, round openings look more like Henry Moore figures than druid monoliths.

On a bluff perched three brushed stainless steel squares, “Three Squares Vertical Diagonal” by American kinetic artist George Rickey, who died last year. Set on their points, they rotated slowly in the wind, playing with light and air.

Soon it was time to dress for dinner in the yukata (cotton kimonos) provided by the hotel. At Japanese inns it’s traditional to visit a communal bath before dinner and to dine wearing a yukata. Even though we were in a Western-style hotel, with beds rather than futons, Davis assured us that yukata were the preferred dress that evening. We strolled down the hill to the International Campground. On our way we watched the sun set behind Yayoi Kusama’s “Pumpkin,” a giant, black-dotted yellow fiberglass squash plopped down regally at the end of a dock.

We dined on shabu-shabu served in a yurt that houses one of the three restaurants in the Cultural Village. (Other choices are the Benesse House Restaurant, which serves elegant Japanese cuisine, and the Benesse House Cafe, for rice bowls and Western snacks.) We sat on cushions around four braziers as waiters brought us sliced meat and vegetables to swish around in a bubbling caldron of broth. Because our tour group had the yurt to itself, most of the women sat cross-legged like the men instead of straining our knees and tucking our legs demurely beneath us in the traditional posture of Japanese women.

We did bow to Japanese etiquette, however, in pouring sake generously for our fellow diners, never for ourselves. Soon I was feeling very warm and mellow, and we were all talking and laughing raucously. We wove up the hill in a group and made our separate ways to our rooms. Then John and I slipped out for another look at our art collection.

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Artful Japan

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, Japan Airlines has nonstop and connecting service (change of plane) to Osaka. Korean Airlines and All Nippon offer connecting service. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $920.

For maps and directions for Naoshima Cultural Center, go to www.naoshimais.co.jp and click on “English” and then “Visit us.”

WHERE TO STAY:

Naoshima Cultural Village, Benesse Island, Gotanji, Naoshima-cho, Kagawa-gun, Kagawa Pre- fecture 761-3110; 011-81-87-892-2030, fax 011-81- 87-892-2259, www.naoshima-is.co.jp/english/hotel/index.html. Doubles at Benesse House are $204-$467. The International Campground has heated canvas cabins and paos, spacious Mongolian yurts, each with four beds (from $34 per person; $25.50 per child 8 and younger). Admission to Naoshima Cultural Village, included in room rates, is $8.50 for adults and includes the gallery, the Art House Project and other works.

WHERE TO EAT:

Benesse House Restaurant, one of three restaurants at Naoshima Cultural Village, serves kaiseki, a refined Japanese cuisine with tiny, artfully arranged multiple courses. Reservations are required two days in advance for all meals except breakfast. Several kaiseki menus, $43-$136, as well as a choice of seafood dinners, $68-$153.

Benesse House Cafe offers curry, rice bowls and Western snacks such as salad or “salmon bagel sandwiches” for around $5-$10.

International Campground serves Japanese and Western meals. Barbecue or seafood stew $26-$85. Reservations required two days in advance.

TOURS:

Journeys East, P.O. Box 1161-W, Middletown, CA 95461; (800) 527-2612 or (707) 987-4531, fax (707) 987-4831, www.journeyseast.com, arranged our two-week tour. Tours are planned Oct. 4-18 and May 22-June 5 and cost $4,485 per person, double occupancy.

Esprit Travel & Tours, 200 S. San Pedro St., Suite 506, Los Angeles, CA 90012; (800) 377-7481 or (213) 346-9100, fax (213) 346-9120, www.esprittravel.com, also has an 11-night tour, which includes a stay on Naoshima, for $4,750 per person, double occupancy.

TO LEARN MORE:

Japan National Tourist Organization, 515 S. Figueroa St., Suite 1470, Los Angeles, CA 90071; (213) 623-1952, www.japantravelinfo.com.

-- Judith B. Herman