6 Travel Celebrating Heaven


Earth and Time Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Enoura Observatory


By Michael Dunn


Opening last October after more than a decade of preparation, the Enoura Observatory is an installation of gallery spaces, performance stages, a traditional teahouse, two ancient gates and many, yet-more ancient stones, constructed in the words of the founder ‘as a forum for disseminating art and culture both within Japan and to the world’. Te project has been assembled on an idyllic site of citrus groves and native forest, backed by the Hakone Mountains and overlooking Sagami Bay, not far from the Tokyo/ Yokohama conurbation. Perhaps tied in with a visit to the MOA Museum in nearby Atami – its new galleries also designed by Sugimoto – it would be difficult to imagine a more pleasant cultural excursion for a day out of town. Long famous for his photographs of sea-horizons, old cinema interiors and museum dioramas,


Hiroshi


Sugimoto has also branched out into architectural design projects as well as the production of Japanese performing arts. He has become noted as a master of wa-fu modaan – that minimalist style inspired by traditional Japanese arts and using fine materials, that we recognise as simply peerless, refined taste. Tis is a taste that we much associate with the world


of the Tea Ceremony


Te glass stage is viewed from a fan-shaped construction of stepped-stone seating copied on a smaller scale from the famous Roman amphitheatre that can still be seen in Ferento, north of Rome


–


monochrome rustic tea-bowls, unfinished wood, bare tatami mats etc.


– while often overlooking the equally profound cultural influence of Shinto that dates from prehistoric times and is still a vital part of Japanese life today. In shrines around the country, we see the beauty of worn wood and stone combined in a style that seems ageless, perfectly complimentary and at home with


surrounding nature and


underscoring a profound reverence for myriad kami – those indefinable deities, spirits, or supernatural forces that somehow effect human lives for better or worse. Tere is nothing new about what we now consider as minimalist taste. Te Enoura Observatory is


Sugimoto’s most ambitious endeavour to date where, in addition to gaming with line,


form and texture, he


considers the majestic yet subtle changes brought about by light, the summer and winter solstices, and by time itself. Just a year or two younger than myself, he realises that little of Enoura’s material structure is likely to change dramatically during the rest of his life, but likes to imagine visitors to the site, thousands of years in the future when the wood and steel components will have long disappeared, wandering around the stone remains and pondering their meaning and purpose. Sugimoto is an avid stone-hunter and has accumulated exceptional examples from all over the country. Many of these have already been employed by


ASIAN ART MARCH 2018 Te torii gate that faces the Uchoten tea house


SUGIMOTO IS AN AVID STONE-HUNTER AND HAS


ACCUMULATED EXCEPTIONAL EXAMPLES FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY


man at some time or other in history and so picturing the millennia of these stones’ past and future adds another dimension to how the site can be perceived and appreciated in the present. While we are familiar with the


evolution of man’s art and culture so far, Sugimoto claims that ‘Today, as we stand at a critical point in our evolution, art has lost its onetime clarity of purpose. What should art today express? We cannot answer this question simply, but what we can do is return to the wellspring of human consciousness, explore its sources, and chart the course it has followed thus far’. Elaborating that this is the mission of the Odawara Art Foundation founded by himself to own and manage the site, Sugimoto further explains: ‘At the dawn of history, when the ancients first gained self-awareness, their first step was to search for and identify the place they


occupied within the vastness of the starry firmament. Tis search for meaning and identity was also the primal force behind art’. Visitors are allowed a couple of hours to consider this concept while wandering around the spacious site, starting at a reception building where visitors are given maps and an explanatory guide. Here windows all round look out to the surrounding mountains and citrus farms, but the highlight is a massive table made of Yakusugi cedar-wood harvested from trees over a thousand years old, found only on Yakushima Island to the South of Kagoshima. Te old wood is of a golden-straw colour with a matt surface, wavy grain, and holes here and there that no doubt housed generations of tunnelling insects. Tis huge piece of wood is supported by, and perforated at one end, by an ancient stone water-basin originally from the Daikan-ji temple on Mt Koya, looking like a volcano emerging from a vast plain. Two structures on the site have been made to celebrate the solstices: that which captures the first rays of the sun in mid-summer is a 100-metre long gallery with a wall built of Oya stone, facing an opposite wall of glass windows and a garden of stones Continued on page 8


Te bridge to one of the stages is a 23-ton slab of stone that Sugimoto found in Fukushima Prefecture that is spectacularly cracked through from end to end, like a bolt of lightning


Te Rock Garden that makes use of ancient stones found throughout Japan


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