The Setouchi International Art Triennale is a contemporary art festival held every three years on several islands in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan and the coastal cities of Takamatsu and Tamano. The festival was inaugurated in 2010 with the aim of revitalizing the Seto Inland Sea area, which has suffered from depopulation in recent years, as well as long-standing environmental degradation from illegal industrial waste-dumping practices conducting during the 1970s following rapid industrialization in the area.
Initiated as a public-private partnership between the local prefectural and municipal governments and education publisher Benesse, the festival focuses on artistic endeavors that highlight local communities and environmental conditions, as well as site-specific installations that make use of existing spaces and ecological features. The festival has played a significant role in the growth and redevelopment of the region, serving as a leading example of the potentials of reinvestment in peripheral communities in decline after the explosive growth of major cities in Japan during the second half of the 20th century.
The Triennale lasts for eight months with three main sessions; the spring session runs from March to mid-April, the summer session runs from mid-July to early September, and the autumn session runs from October to early November. While several of the museums and installations are permanent exhibitions, many of the smaller islands offer temporary exhibitions limited to a single session. Notable permanent fixtures include a series of concrete museums on Naoshima designed by architect Tadao Ando, as well as the Teshima Art Museum (2010), designed by Ryue Nishizawa featuring Rei Naito's Matrix, and the Art House Project (1998-present) on Naoshima, a series of commissions involving architects and artists who restore abandoned homes and other buildings and reinvent the spaces through artistic intervention.
History
Postwar industrial development and environmental degradation
The islands and cities that make up the triennale are located within the eastern portion of the Seto Inland Sea and the Setonaikai National Park, which was established as Japan's first national park in 1934. The area was the site of major industrial development during the country's economic boom in the 1960s, and approximately one-third of the major factories built during this period were located in the Setonaikai region. As unchecked economic development continued to accelerate in the area, the islands in the sea became sites of illegal industrial waste dumping during the 1970s and 1980s, coming to a head in a large-scale national controversy in 1990 when it was discovered that 710,000 tons of industrial waste from scrapped cars had been illegally incinerated and buried on the island of Teshima.
Formation of Benesse Art Site project
In response to these environmental conditions, coupled with the challenges of aging and decreasing populations in the islands, Tetsuhiro Fukutake, founder of the Okayama-based Fukutake Publishing Co. (later Benesse), met with Chikatsugu Miyake, then-mayor of Naoshima in 1985 to discuss a plan for redeveloping the southern portion of the island as a cultural and educational facility for children. Though Tetsuhiro passed away just months after the meeting, his son Soichiro took on the project, which resulted in the construction of the Naoshima International Camp in 1989. Designed by architect Tadao Ando, who helmed the designs of the major exhibition spaces across the islands, the campground would form the foundation of the Benesse Art Site, the collective title for the Benesse-initiated art projects on Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima. Frog and Cat, a large-scale public sculpture by Karel Appel was the first artwork to be installed on the island as part of the Benesse Art Site project in 1989.
Under his vision that "economy is subordinate to culture," Fukutake continued commission artists, curators, and architects and invest in cultural projects over the following decades. The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum (now Benesse House), was established in 1992 to exhibit works from Fukutake's collection, followed by the Chichu Museum in 2004, which features site-specific installations by Walter de Maria and James Turrell, as well as four works from Claude Monet's Water Lilies series. Both museums were designed by Tadao Ando, and feature his signature material of concrete and exhibit a keen attentiveness towards environmental context, artistic content, and the affective potentials of space.