Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (42 page)

Benesse Island is not just a museum. It is certainly not just a hotel. It is a synthesis of the two. It reminds me of the Buddhist monasteries where, for a small fee, you can stay with the monks to contemplate the world as they do, eating their food and living in graceful seclusion, neither monk nor tourist. The rooms at Benesse Island are not fancy, but they are comfortable and elegant and have good art; mine featured signed Keith Haring works on paper. Each room has a wall of glass, so that nothing seems to lie between you and the sea. Meals
are served in a dining room that is part of the museum, and there, too, you are surrounded by art, with a few striking arrangements of flowers always, and more of that amazing view. The food is excellent and complex: meals of many laboriously crafted components, delicate and flavorful, all served in equally well-crafted ceramic dishes.

Tadao Ando’s museum building is a study in simple geometries weighted against one another. The basic structure is a spiral in poured concrete (which seems to be a muted homage to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin), with a rectilinear wing in rough stone that houses the guest rooms. The whole thing is built into the hillside. To reach the Annex, at the top of the hill, you get into a cable car and are carried on an angle up to a wonder of fountains, a great central pool, and a radial arrangement of rooms. The style is powerful but not grand. Below the museum proper are exhibition spaces for large works of art. Part of the place’s charm is that it’s hard to tell where the museum ends and the natural landscape begins. Wild grasses grow uninterrupted over the roof of the building, and art is displayed partly in the museum, partly in semi-museum-spaces, and partly on the open seashore. Benesse is not a place for boundaries.

The museum has works by about two dozen artists, including Jasper Johns (his 1968
White Alphabets
), Bruce Nauman (the giant neon
100 Live and Die
), and Cy Twombly (a gorgeous chalklike scribble). There are also commissioned pieces by another dozen or so, including Kan Yasuda (meditative giant disks called
Secret of the Sky
), Jannis Kounellis (a work of rolled lead and driftwood and ceramics, positioned against a window like some industrial obstruction to the view), David Tremlett (wall paintings), and Richard Long (a stone circle on the floor mirroring a painted circle on the wall). There is in general one work by each artist; taken together, they form a miniature survey of late-twentieth-century art. My particular favorite is a series of photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto that look at first glance like multiple prints of a single ocean view, but are in fact of different oceans. They are hung on the museum’s terrace so that if you sit in one of the chairs provided, the horizons of the photos line up with the actual horizon, and the sea you are gazing at lines up with the seas of the photos. The effect is ineffably magical.

Around the museum, scattered in various outdoor spots, are works
and installations by Yayoi Kusama (the giant pumpkin), Alexander Calder (a standing fulcrum mobile that shifts with the wind), Dan Graham (
Cylinder Bisected by Plane
), and others. You can peruse the catalogue and go on a treasure hunt, but it’s nicer just to walk around, trying to guess who made the various pieces and what they mean, then checking the catalogue to see if you were right and what you missed. I loved Walter De Maria’s giant reflective globes, in which you can see yourself and the whole of this landscape. And there’s Cai Guo-Qiang’s
Cultural Melting Bath
: in the early evening, you can lie in a Western-style hot tub filled with medicinal herbs and experience cosmic harmony while you watch the sunset through the filigree shapes of giant scholar’s rocks (the craggy stones that Chinese literati once used to remind themselves of the landscape’s rough splendor).

While you have to find the outdoor installations yourself, you are given a guide to the ones in the town of Honmura. A few old houses there, externally much like all the others, have been restored with special care. Inside you’ll find neither cooking pots nor futons rolled back for the day but, rather, room-size installations known as the Art House Projects. The James Turrell house, restored in collaboration with Ando, mixes traditional, Zen, and modernist elements. You walk into darkness, feel your way to a bench, and sit for at least ten minutes before your eyes are able to discern, glowing out of the void, five rectangles of blue light, a cobalt intensity breaking the blackness and throbbing away from and then closer to you. It’s pure meditation. The Tatsuo Miyajima house is flooded with water, and under the water, numbers in red and green on a series of LEDs change constantly, creating an effect that is eerie and haunting and unbelievably beautiful—at once primitive and futuristic. Visitors tread on a thin walkway around the edge. Several other Art House Projects are under construction.

As you wander through the village to see these installations, stopping also, perhaps, at the town’s two shrines, the locals nod and smile. They like the art in their town; moreover, they seem to like the smartly dressed visitors from Tokyo and New York who have become familiar to them. Unlike many experiences of contemporary art, this one is warm. Here, the intellect, the senses, and the heart all find their satisfactions.

Since my visit, the Benesse Art Site has expanded considerably. The museum complex now encompasses nearby Teshima and Inujima Islands and includes three new museums on Naoshima, all designed by Tadao Ando. The Chichu Museum houses five paintings in Monet’s
Water Lilies
series, as well as work by James Turrell and Walter De Maria; the Lee Ufan Museum is dedicated to the work of the Korean minimalist; and the Ando Museum celebrates the architect. Benesse Art Site continues to commission artists to design its guest rooms. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are currently at work on a double suite. The Teshima Art Museum, an artistic collaboration between artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, opened in 2010 as part of the Benesse expansion. Teshima Island also hosts Christian Boltanski’s project
Les Archives du Coeur
, and the Teshima Yokoo House, a residence transformed into gallery and exhibition space. Inujima Island, third in the developing archipelago, now has its own museum, located in the remains of a copper refinery; the Seaside Inujima Gallery, featuring the work of Fiona Tan; and the Inujima Art House Project, five gallery spaces created largely of recycled materials. Interviewed by Lee Yulin about the larger Benesse project, its founder said that he had sought to create “an island of dreams for children.”

Travel + Leisure
, August 2003

I will admit that part of the lure of the Solomon Islands was the name. When I made the reservations to go, I joked that I was leading a trend in eponymous travel. But I was tempted also by the sense that in its obscurity the destination preserved some kind of authenticity, whatever authenticity is. My second day there, I went to board a local flight and found that it had been canceled and that I’d have to go a day later. When I asked what the problem was, the desk clerk explained that the pilot had converted that morning to Seventh-day Adventism and could no longer fly on the Sabbath.

A
mong the fantasies I have always harbored is one of the South Seas. While some people who dream of this corner of the world want lavish Tahitian resorts, I wanted desert islands untouched by the ravages of modernity and sky-blue seas with only an occasional canoe or school of dolphins to break the surface. I wanted to meet men and women who would be hungry for my news and generous with theirs. I wanted to be something between Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe. I was very young when I first heard of the islands out there that had my name, and I was thrilled to discover that the Solomons were about as remote as anywhere else on earth. I wanted to go; I can’t remember not wanting to. In
Moby-Dick
, Herman Melville
wrote that these islands, though charted and explored and visited, remained terra incognita.

The Solomons, just east of Papua New Guinea, are a chain of almost a thousand islands, many tiny, a few quite large, about a third populated. The country covers more than 520,000 square miles of sea and receives about four thousand tourists a year. There are at least a hundred local languages and dialects; the lingua franca is pidgin, though many people speak English because the islands used to be a British protectorate. Traditional life and ceremonies are called
custom
: custom dances, custom bride prices, custom skull caves, and so on. Missionaries Christianized the islands at the turn of the nineteenth century, and almost everyone attends church services, but Christianity has not supplanted local beliefs and rituals. The Solomon Islands were long notorious for head-hunting and cannibalism, and on my first day in the capital city, Honiara, I stopped in a shop to ask about some pointy objects and found out that they were nose bones—to be worn through a pierced septum.

The islands are perhaps best known in the West as the site of the major World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, in which the native population helped Americans defeat the Japanese who were trying to build an air base there. The country, one of the world’s poorest, has no overclass; subsistence affluence is the rule. Economic and power structures in the Solomons are dominated by the Malaita people, and strife between them and other populations is ongoing, but such violence has on no occasion affected visitors.

The four of us—a friend from high school, Jessica; her husband, Chuck; my boyfriend, John; and I—flew into Honiara and met with our trusty agent, Wilson Maelaua, who was to get us through every difficulty these remote islands could throw our way. I had chosen to start with the island of Makira because Chuck had introduced me to Roger James, who was coordinating Conservation International’s operation there. Makira supports more single-island endemic birds than any other island in the Solomons, and CI is working to protect its interior rainforests. Local landowners have established a plan for forest management under the guidance of CI and other nongovernmental organizations, which entails showing the villagers how the
protection of the land serves their own interest as well as that of the world. Roger married a Makira bushwoman and has made a life more local than the locals’. “If you want total immersion,” he promised me, “I’ll give you total immersion.”

Soon after we landed in Makira, we set off for the highlands, accompanied by Roger, a posse of local guides, carriers for our baggage, and John Waihuru, the
bigman
(pidgin for “man of status”), who was the expedition leader. We meandered through the valley for some miles, then came to the first of sixteen river crossings. We walked against the current through water up to our waists while the carriers balanced our rather substantial suitcases on their heads. From there we began the climb upward through the rain forest. As we scrambled along a path invisible to the untrained eye, each of us was helped by our own guide: gentle, steady, and—amazingly—barefoot.

One thing you should know about the rainforest: it rains a lot there. We kept under mild skies for some time, but then the storms began—cascades, avalanches of water that drenched us within seconds. Our way grew muddy and slippery, and each of us clung to his or her personal guide. We seldom fell because we were in good hands, but we were always on the brink of falling, and the water beat into our faces, at one particularly inopportune moment washing out one of my contact lenses. We ached from the climbing and the slipping and the chaotic feeling that we didn’t know where we were or where we were going; from the river crossings when the current came up to our shoulders; and from the weight of our wet clothes. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the worst rain, John Waihuru announced, implausibly, that we were stopping for lunch. This seemed a ludicrous proposition, but as we watched, he and the other locals dragged sticks from the jungle, pulled down enormous fronds, and erected a shelter with a floor of banana leaves. Palms were quickly woven into plates, and within five minutes we were able to sit down on logs, dry off, eat, and recover from the morning’s climb.

We made it to a halfway house where we would spend the night: a lean-to of dry leaves that felt impossibly luxurious after our long day. Another day of trekking brought us, near nightfall, to Hauta. The villagers who had not been part of our trekking party, some twenty-five
people, lined up to shake our hands. Aside from Roger, we were the first foreigners they had seen in more than two years.

Hauta was situated high in the mountains, with a commanding view, beside a fresh stream. The houses were made of leaves, and opposite the
bigman
’s hut, where we were to stay, was an almost equally large hut for the village pig. We went to the stream and washed off days of mud, then toured the garden plots where villagers grow taro, cassava, and sweet potatoes, the staples of local life. We had dinner in the shared kitchen hut by the light of the sunset and a fire that burned in a circle of stones. The villagers have metal blades on their knives, but aside from that, life in the bush is much as it must have been a thousand years ago with one exception: ramen noodles. These seem to have taken the Solomons by storm; for nearly a month, we had everything with ramen noodles: ferns with ramen noodles, cabbage with ramen noodles, taro root with ramen noodles, sweet potatoes with ramen noodles, green papaya with coconut and ramen noodles, even rice with ramen noodles. Having lived through the trip, I would sooner eat dirt than encounter another flavor packet. But that first night, I had not yet learned to deplore them, and though the food was not good at least it had the advantage of newness.

After dinner, we sat in a big communal hut with a small lantern on the floor and learned, to the locals’ immense amusement, to chew betel nut, a skill I hope never to use again. Betel is a mild intoxicant to which most Solomon Islanders are attached; you chew it until it gets soft and then dip a rolled pepper leaf into mineral lime to potentiate the pulp. The nut makes your mouth water, and you spit a lot as you chew it. It also turns your whole mouth a lurid red; chewed regularly, it makes your gums recede and your teeth fall out. If you’re not used to it, it can also give you a horrendous stomachache. It makes you dizzy. The lime can easily burn the roof of your mouth. It was a late eight o’clock by the time we had stopped spitting and curled up on the floor of our hut and drifted into deep, captivating sleep.