As far as museum architecture goes, the Simose Art Museum in Otake, Hiroshima Prefecture, stands out, echoing the landscape of its inspiration, the Setouchi islands, which play host to their own influential triennale.
Two-thirds of Simose’s gallery space is outside its main building, split into eight connecting boxes that seem to float on a shallow basin of water. The box structures look like a candy-colored art installation, and yet they somehow blend into the seascape. At twilight, their angular forms light up to glow like gigantic lanterns for an even more spectacular view.
A visit to the museum, which opened in March of last year, is an immersive and twofold cultural experience. There are, as expected, the scheduled art exhibitions, but Simose also offers a comprehensive overview of the work of Shigeru Ban, the museum’s architect and one of Japan’s foremost designers.
Renowned for his compassionate approach to architecture — whether it be for institutions, private residences or humanitarian disaster shelters — Ban is acclaimed for his exploration of renewable materials, respect for nature and innovative use of form. His hand is unmistakable throughout Simose, from the rising timber arches that branch across the main building’s ceiling and its quirky cardboard-tube cafe chairs to the vivid waterfront galleries that can be changed in configuration for each exhibition it hosts. It all provides a compelling contrast to the museum’s diverse collection of ornate Emile Galle glassware, traditional Japanese crafts, and modern and contemporary works — yet there is more.
Shigeru Ban’s design for Simose Art Museum includes eight colorful moveable galleries that seem to float on a pool of water facing the Seto Inland Sea.
| © SIMOSE
“Because the location of the Simose Art Museum is far away from Hiroshima city, I thought that it was important to make it very interesting to visit again and again,” Ban says. “Therefore, Simose is not just a museum, but a place to stay overnight every season. That is why I added hotel villas and a restaurant. I also wanted to make Simose an architectural museum as well as an art museum.”
Located on a vast swathe of verdant land, Simose hosts 10 villas for staying guests, each distinctive in exterior design and exhibiting the varied architectural and material concepts of Ban’s career. Five wildly different Forest Villas lie tucked between trees, four of which are re-creations of past Ban commissions of summer houses in Japan.
The fifth, Cross Wall House, which was purpose-built for Simose, is a structure of primary-colored turret-like extensions elevated above ground and supported by just two central intersecting walls. Along the waterfront, a row of deceptively simple villas allows guests to view the Seto Inland Sea, each featuring the exposed geometric zigzag patterns of Austrian Kielsteg timber and different layouts with Ban-designed interiors.
An interior image of one of Shigeru Ban’s Kielsteg houses built for Simose Art Garden Villas.
| © SIMOSE
“The four replicated villas are the foundation of works from my earlier period of career when I designed my so-called Case Study Houses,” says Ban. “Kielsteg is a very innovative type of wood engineering, but it was originally designed as floor slab and roofing and is not that utilitarian, so I decided to use it not only for the roof, but also as structural walls and screens to showcase its characteristic profile.”
A life of experimentation
To celebrate its first anniversary, Simose Art Museum is honoring the work of Matazo Kayama (1927-2004), an artist acclaimed for his multidisciplinary, genre-blurring approach to nihonga (traditional Japanese painting).
For Yuki Kayama, the artist’s granddaughter, the distant location and architecture of the museum resonate with her grandfather’s unusual painting style and the relevance of the era of his work.
“To the left is Miyajima, a sanctuary of tradition. To the right lies a group of industrial complexes, symbols of postwar economic growth,” Yuki says. “Kayama created a unique artistic world in the space between tradition and innovation, and I think that it is significant to view his works at this museum where two seemingly asymmetrical landscapes are exquisitely fused.”
The son of a Kyoto nishijin (Japanese brocade) textile designer and grandson of a Maruyama School painter, Kayama showed an aptitude for art from an early age. “Matazo Kayama: Seeking innovative styles” begins with two works from his teens — meticulously detailed images of a fox and a group of monkeys. Both were painted during World War II before the most traumatic of life events: the devastating atomic bombing of Japan. Recruited to create teaching materials for a naval academy in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Kayama watched in horror as the mushroom cloud of debris billowed over nearby Hiroshima, the city where his father grew up.
The exhibition explores the evolution of Kayama’s style from there on. At times, it’s a display of pure joy in expressing the vitality of everyday life — wild and domestic animals, birds and insects — with the exquisite detail of hairline brushstrokes, gold paint and rich, natural pigments. Other times, it delves into the anxiousness of an artist concerned for the future of Japanese-style painting during postwar modernization and Westernization.
Influenced by the cave paintings of Lascaux, Bruegel, post-impressionism, cubism, surrealism, futurism, East Asian painting and Japanese crafts, Kayama continuously experimented with composition, form, technique and material. Like an artistic diplomat, he found ways to harmonize nihonga with other genres to complement each other, often in a subtle manner that belied the complexity of his work.
Cat calling
His beloved Persian and Himalayan cats — Aoku, Bouquet and Coco — were among his favorite models; “sublime creatures that show a strange sense of mystery at random times,” he once said of them. Piercing azure blue eyes peek from their soft fur, delicately painted hair by hair, in a Kyoto nihonga style and stippled at the edges to give the creatures a noble glow that he felt they deserved.
Other animals were often symbolic, betraying a darker underlying sentiment of the time. His “Lost Deer” of 1954, a geometric work influenced by futurism, a movement that rejected the past to celebrate modernism, seems emaciated, struggling — like postwar Japan and its nihonga — to find water ahead a landscape of bare trees and snow-capped mountains.
A detail of one of Matazo Kayama’s “Cat” paintings, featuring his pet cat Aoku.
| © SIMOSE
That is not to say Kayama pined for a return to classical Japanese painting. Far from it. He embraced change, searching for innovative ways to revive it.
Displayed alone in one of the movable galleries is “The Blue Sun” (1959), a depiction of a gaunt and blinded crow precariously perched on an ashen branch as a relentless sun blazes behind it. According to Kayama’s granddaughter, the tumultuous nature of the monotone work — its jagged lines and heavily textured acrylic on canvas — reflects the artist’s anxiety about his own shortcomings during a period of financial difficulty and experimentation with Western materials. Such apprehensiveness about the future, however, fueled Kayama’s artistic exploration. He collaborated with Japanese artisans, painting pottery, kimono and fans, allowed his work to be reproduced on then-innovative large-scale ceramic panels, and extensively researched every artistic process.
A detail of “The Blue Sun” (1959) Matazo Kayama’s acrylic painting of a blind crow perched on a bare branch ahead of a blazing sun.
| © SIMOSE
Between his 30s and 50s, he traveled across Japan, taking countless photographs of mountains in order to paint collages of different views inspired by the multiple perspectives of Northern Song landscape painting. His “Mt. Huangshan in a Sea of Clouds” (1995), an ink-painted screen depicting China’s spiritual mountainscape towering above atmospheric wisps of clouds, is prefaced in the exhibition with a video detailing the hiking trips, numerous photos and intense planning behind its three layers of different perspectives.
Seeds of influence
Outside, as if drifting in the Simose Art Museum’s pool of water, the glimmering golds and pinks of “Oboro,” Kayama’s cherry-blossom screen replicated on ceramic panels, harmoniously bring together his work, Ban’s contemporary structures and the surrounding landscape of Iwakuni. It seems apt to discover that a former version of “Oboro,” of which the digitization of colors was overseen by Kayama in collaboration with Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics, was also displayed at the 2016 international G7 Ise-Shima summit.
A view of Matazo Kayama’s “Screen with Floral Fans” (original owned by the Yamatane Museum of Art) reproduced in 2018 on large-scale ceramic panels by Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics and displayed at Simose Art Museum.
| © SIMOSE
“As Japanese painting evolved, it has absorbed, selected and refined aspects of other nations’ cultures and our art has blossomed according to the needs of the times. How can the fruit, as part of Japanese culture and as an original ‘seed,’ influence other cultures? I do not know the answers to these questions,” wrote Kayama in “Kayama Matazo: New Triumphs for Old Traditions — The Japanese Galleries of the British Museum” (1996).
“It is my hope, however, that I will help our painting produce more flowers, which will become fruit, in order to create Japanese art that will in the future become a valuable seed beneath the cultural soils of all people.”
Shigeru Ban’s Simose Art Garden Villas
Cross Wall House
Built specifically for Simose, Cross Wall House features a central intersecting wall that unites brightly colored turret-like spaces around it. The most vibrant of the Simose Art Villas, its curved interiors are a balance of equally vivid hues and the simplicity of neutral furniture.
Cross Wall House, designed by Shigeru Ban
| © SIMOSE
Paper House
After Ban’s original Paper House was built at Lake Yamanaka in 1995, his signature cardboard tubes received a Japanese ministry certification as a structural material. The recycled paper tubes are used to form S-shaped walls that sweep around the exterior and extend into a glass-wrapped home to divide it into curved living spaces. Even the toilet is enclosed in a giant cardboard tube.
Wall-less House
A re-creation of a vacation home in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, designed in 1997, this villa has no interior walls. Built into a hillside, its single floor curves upward to the roof at the back to provide the strength to support its ceiling. The entire facade consists of glass sliding doors, giving the impression that even the exterior has no barrier.
House of Double Roof
Based on a 1993 villa in Yamanaka, Yamanashi Prefecture, House of Double Roof has a top sheet of corrugated metal designed to withstand heavy snowfall and safely installed high above the ceilings of the home below. Glass walls offer guests views from all directions, and the rooftop of the living room doubles as a covered terrace for an outdoor jacuzzi.
House of Double Roof, designed by Shigeru Ban
| © SIMOSE
Furniture House
Furniture such as bookcases and closets serve as structural supports in this villa, a replica of another holiday home built in 1995 at Lake Yamanaka. Using modular pieces of furniture made by artisans ensures quality interiors but also eliminates the need for conventional pillars or beams, making it both space- and cost-effective.
The Kielsteg Houses
For all the Kielsteg Houses, Ban used a lightweight timber honeycomb-like construction invented in Austria. Inspired by its zig-zag cross section, Ban chose to use Kielsteg for the floor slabs, as it was created for, as well as decorative walls to filter light into the living spaces.