Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art

About

Completed in 1994 in Nagi, Okayama, with a view toward Mount Nagi, this museum was designed by architect Arata Isozaki's studio. It is regarded as Japan's first "third-generation museum" — one in which building and artwork were conceived together as a single, inseparable work. The exhibition space is divided into three rooms — Earth, Sun, and Moon — each built from the outset to house a single artist's permanent installation: Aiko Miyawaki's Utsurohi in the Earth room, Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins's The Ubiquitous Site — Nagi's Ryoan-ji, Architecture Which Body Constructs in the Sun room, and Kazuo Okazaki's HISASHI in the Moon room. Each room follows its own orientation: the Earth room's long axis points toward the summit of Mount Nagi, the cylindrical Sun room aligns with the north-south axis, and the crescent-shaped Moon room faces the direction of the mid-autumn moon at ten o'clock at night.