Naoshima, the Island That Became a Museum

Naoshima is eight square kilometres of pine, granite and fishing harbour in the Seto Inland Sea, and it is one of the strangest, most rewarding places in Japan. Its northern end still carries a copper smelter; its southern end carries Tadao Ando. From the late 1980s the publisher Soichiro Fukutake and Ando began embedding museums into the hillsides, and the island slowly turned into a single continuous artwork you walk through rather than visit.

The Chichu Art Museum is buried entirely underground and lit only by the sky. In one white marble chamber hang five of Monet's water lilies, entered in soft slippers after leaving your shoes at the door; in another, Walter De Maria's black granite sphere sits on a staircase of gilded obelisks; in a third, James Turrell dissolves the wall you are standing in front of into pure coloured space. Nearby, the Lee Ufan Museum sets a few stones and steel plates against the sea, and Benesse House lets guests sleep inside the collection. Out on the pier, Yayoi Kusama's spotted yellow pumpkin sits where the waves reach it, with its red twin at Miyanoura port.

The island's best hours, though, are in Honmura, the old village where the Art House Project turned old houses, a temple site and a shrine (seven sites in all) into installations: Tatsuo Miyajima's LED counters ticking under water in a darkened room, Hiroshi Sugimoto's glass staircase running down into the earth beneath a Shinto shrine, Turrell again in a pitch-black chamber where your eyes take ten minutes to discover what you are looking at. Between them, rent a bicycle, eat udon, soak in Shinro Ohtake's collaged bathhouse, and take the ferry on to Teshima or Inujima. Japan does contemporary art like nowhere else, and this is where it committed hardest.