Japanese billionaire Soichiro Fukutake has created a surreal archipelago of art, including an underground museum of Monets and a luxury hotel designed by Tadao Ando
For Japanese billionaire Soichiro Fukutake, the best place to view contemporary art is not a white-walled museum in New York, Paris or even Tokyo. Rather, it’s an archipelago in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, where he has transformed what were dying industrial waste dumps into a glamorous destination for adventurous art lovers and high-profile collectors like French luxury goods titan François Pinault, Greek industrial magnate Dakis Joannou and Los Angeles arts patron Eli Broad. “Most urban museums are just places for hanging beautiful art,” says the 69-year-old Fukutake. “The art, the building and the environment should work together to wake up the viewer.”
Even if you wake up at 7 am at Benesse House—the $400-a-night hotel where many of Fukutake’s treasures are housed—you can indulge in an experience unique among the world’s finest resorts.With no guards or velvet ropes to block access, there is a museumful of blue-chip works to be explored, including a 1962 Giacometti bronze, a David Hockney swimming pool painting, a whitewashed Jasper Johns alphabet work and, surrounded by a sloping walkway, a 10-foot-tall neon-light sculpture by Venice Biennale winner Bruce Nauman, flashing provocative aphorisms in red, pink, blue and yellow: “Feel and Die”, “Fear and Live … .”
One of Fukutake’s goals for the islands is to see that his collection lives beyond his lifetime. “Through the project, I’m searching for eternity,” he explains. “I want the art to be significant in any age.”
To build his legacy, he has collaborated with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, known for his minimalist sensibility, improbable angles and liberal use of smooth, unpainted concrete. Together, they have created a complex of elegantly designed structures, three of them carved into the hills of Naoshima Island, a 5-square-mile outpost of rolling terrain, small villages and stunning views of the sea.
Ando’s most striking structure, the Chichu Art Museum (chichu means “underground” in Japanese), is almost entirely below the earth but doesn’t feel that way, with its two courtyards open to the sky and the elements, surrounded by slanted walkways, and skylights in three of the larger rooms. The Chichu houses work by just three artists, including five late paintings from Claude Monet’s water lily series. Before entering the space, visitors must don soft white slippers to avoid soiling the luminous white floor tiles made from Carrara marble. “Many people say that Naoshima is better than l’Orangerie,” says Fukutake. “In Naoshima it’s a spiritual experience.”
Fukutake made his estimated $1.02 billion fortune through his share in Benesse Holdings, a company his late father founded in 1955 as Fukutake Publishing. After his father died of a heart attack in 1986, he changed the name to Benesse, from the Latin words for “well-being”.
Today, Benesse owns the Berlitz language schools, correspondence courses and 275 nursing homes throughout Japan. Under Fukutake’s direction, first as chairman and now as executive advisor, Benesse funnels 5 percent of company shares into the Fukutake Foundation, which supports the art site. He has also invested $240 million of his family fortune into the project.
While Tokyo would be the obvious location for such a museum, Fukutake had come to see the city as a destructive centre of money and stress. “Tokyo is chaos and madness, like New York,” he says. “There is too much—too much entertainment, too many products, too many people.” Better to appreciate art surrounded by the natural world.
In addition to three Ando-designed museums and the museum-cum-hotel, Fukutake has commissioned 20 site-specific works. In 1995, Benesse also established a prize at the Venice Biennale for an artist it would fund to produce a piece for the islands.
Images: Osamu Watanabe; Noboru Morikawa
(This story appears in the 02 October, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)