アート島ノート • Art Island Notebook

直島の本村地区にある日本家屋の大広間を改装し、アート島センターとしてアートギャラリー、書店、スタジオが完成しました。An old house near on Naoshima has slowly transformed into the Art Island Center gallery, bookshop, and studio.

The Setouchi Triennale attempts to revitalize twelve remote islands with depopulating and aging communities by hosting an international art festival to promote tourism. However, simply defining "revitalization" is a challenge.

The physical or material manifestation of islands is simultaneously the most obvious and least justifiable way of describing an island. It's an interesting place to start a discussion of island borders.

As Covid-19 spreads in Japan, the normally bustling Naoshima is more like it was twenty years ago, before the island had become a tourist destination. What felt normal a year ago has become strange, as locals do their best to wait out the pandemic amid this unnaturally quiet spring.

At the Critical Tourism Studies - Asia Pacific conference at Wakayama University, panelists from universities and institutions across Japan as well as the United States, Sweden, Denmark, and Hong Kong reached across geographies and disciplines to present a range of nuanced cases of art and tourism in rural places.

夏の暑さに耐えながらも直島の若いアーティストたちは、絵の具で手や足を使って、海の生き物や子どもたちの思う「直島」を描きました。Braving the summer heat, Naoshima’s young artists used their hands, feet, and buckets of paint to illustrate their vision of the surrounding seascape and landscape.

今月、広島大学の学生たちが直島に訪れ、島についての観光、移住者、インフラ、地場産品、芸術、産業などの分野調査を行いました。This month, students from Hiroshima University visited Naoshima to conduct fieldwork, studying the island’s tourism, in-migrants, infrastructure, local products, art, and industry.

Once home to as many as 4,000 people, Inujima is down to only a few dozen elderly inhabitants. It’s also a major art tourism destination. This second life has complicated the story of Inujima’s decline, though whether this is for the better is a matter of debate.

For generations the residents of Naoshima drew their water out of wells. There was a problem, however: the water smelled terrible. So Chikatsugu Miyake, mayor of Naoshima, invited the mayor of the nearby city of Tamano to the island, and served him tea.

What is an art island? Can such a thing really exist? And what is it like to live on one? Naoshima’s interwoven identities defy easy classification—as with anything worth looking at, the closer you get, the more complex the island becomes.