Naoshima: An isle with a creative horizon

The easiest way to make our three children groan is to suggest a visit to an art museum.

So it was with some trepidation that on a family vacation to Japan, my wife and I decided to schedule a two-day visit to an island devoted to contemporary art. The stopover would be a splurge but we hoped the total-immersion tactic might finally put an end to the griping about touring art museums.

Naoshima, in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, is barely ten square miles but has become one of the world's leading centres of modern art. In 1992, the Benesse Corporation, a Japanese publishing and educational company, established the first museum, Benesse House, to display artworks.

Monet magic

Now there is a second museum featuring Claude Monet's water-lily paintings; a series of art installations amid the houses of a village; outdoor art scattered along the coast; and a third museum under construction.

Not only that, the main museum is also the hotel. After the day-trippers have left the island, guests can wander the halls, examining pieces by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and other greats in a space designed by Tadao Ando, one of Japan's most famous architects.

To make the adventure appealing to our children — aged 16, 12 and 8 — we decided to stay in the Oval, a six-room extension of the museum-hotel that you reach by a private monorail you operate. Another Ando creation, the Oval is an open-air, egg-shaped structure set atop one of the island's tallest hills. The rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows and more art by contemporary masters on the walls.

Benesse House sent a van to take us to the museum. As we zipped through the landscape of pine trees and lush green hills, it was a relief to be far from the modernity of most Japanese cities.

Small but surprising

After checking in, we headed to the tiny village of Honmura, where the Art House Project has sprung up amid 200-year-old homes. We walked through the narrow streets and entered a modest house to discover a pool of water that appeared to quiver like Jell-O, the effect of randomly timed, multicoloured digital counters that artist Tatsuo Miyajima had installed beneath the surface. Go'o Shrine, by Hiroshi Sugimoto, appeared to be a small temple with glass stairs, until our kids discovered the stairs continued down into a cave. And James Turrell's installation of Backside of the Moon was so black that we couldn't see anything until we had sat there for ten minutes. This was an eye-opener for our children: Art could be fun.

To get to the Chichu Art Museum, which is built largely underground on another hill overlooking the sea, you walk through a glorious collection of trees and flowers modelled after Monet's own garden. Inside, the selection of water-lily paintings is wonderful.

At the Benesse House, we were studying what appeared to be a wall of blurry paintings of country flags by Yukinori Yanagi. Our daughter, Mara, called out the flags she recognised, when suddenly my wife Cindy exclaimed they were not paintings but individual ant farms of coloured sand. The ants were methodically destroying — and reinventing — the art. Suddenly, it became a game to figure out which countries' flags were on the verge of collapse.

On the second day, we wandered along the coast, stopping at each outdoor art installation we found. Every piece seemed to have a ploy, a revelation or some other wrinkle that captivated our children.

Pumpkin on a pier

The most emblematic image of Naoshima is a grand pumpkin created by Yayoi Kusama: a 6-foot-tall black-and-yellow-dotted fibreglass structure plopped on the edge of a pier.

When we left Naoshima the next day, we agreed the island had been one of the highlights of our tour of Japan. And there were no more complaints about art galleries.