Asia Society of Philippines

Mori Art Museum Introduction

Located in Roppongi Hills, a model for future developments in urban planning, the Mori Art Museum was designed to offer the best in contemporary art and architecture. The Museum opened in October 2003 at the top of the central Mori Tower - a place visible from throughout Tokyo and with sweeping panoramic views from it's Sky View Deck on the 52nd floor.  While the museum is closed between exhibitions, we will meet with Mami Kataoka, the director, who will show you their past exhibits and what they’ve done in the past using slides. The location in Japan and East Asia is important and the Mori considers it one of their missions to become a platform for artists from this region. Since opening the Museum has received high critical acclaim for its wide variety of original exhibitions, many of which have been organized around universal themes.

teamlab PLANETS

teamLab Planets is a museum where you walk through water, and a garden where you become one with the flowers. There are four massive exhibition spaces and two gardens. By immersing the entire body with other people in these massive body immersive artworks, the boundary between the body and the artwork dissolves, the boundaries between the self, others, and the world become continuous, and we explore a new relationship without boundaries between ourselves and the world. Enter barefoot, immerse your body with others in the artwork spaces, and become one with the world.

Enoura Observatory

Designed by contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, Enoura Observatory is a magnificent piece of land art situated among former mandarin orange groves in the coastal area of Enoura in Odawara City. Operated by Sugimoto’s Odawara Art Foundation, the Observatory features a gallery, tea house, outdoor stages and gardens. It was conceived as a site to encourage reflection on the origins of art in human history as well as a venue to promote art and culture nationally and internationally. 

Benesse Art Museum

Benesse House Museum opened in 1992 as a facility integrating a museum with a hotel, based on the concept of "coexistence of nature, art and architecture." Designed by Tadao Ando, the facility is built on high ground overlooking the Seto Inland Sea and features large apertures that serve to open up the interior to the splendid natural surroundings. In addition to exhibiting the painting, sculpture, photography, and installations in its collection, the Museum also contains permanent site-specific installations that artists have created especially for the building, selecting locations on their own and designing the works for those spaces. The Museum's artworks are found not just within its galleries, but in all parts of the building, as well as in scattered locations along the seashore that borders the complex and in the nearby forest. Benesse House Museum is truly a rare site where nature, art, and architecture come together, in an environment containing numerous site-specific works created for the natural environs of Naoshima or inspired by the architectural spaces they inhabit.

Chichu Art Museum

Chichu Art Museum was constructed in 2004 as a site rethinking the relationship between nature and people. The museum was built mostly underground to avoid affecting the beautiful natural scenery of the Seto Inland sea. Artworks by Claude Monet, James Turrell, and Walter De Maria are on permanent display in this building designed by Tadao Ando. Despite being primarily subterranean, the museum lets in an abundance of natural light that changes the appearance of the artworks and the ambience of the space itself with the passage of time, throughout the day and all along the four seasons of the year.
Taking form as the artists and architect bounced ideas off each other, the museum in its entirety can be seen as a very large site-specific artwork.

Art House Project

The Art House Project is an art project underway in Naoshima's Honmura district. It began in 1998 with Kadoya, and currently comprises seven locations: Kadoya, Minamidera, Kinza, Go'o Shrine, Ishibashi, Gokaisho, and Haisha. In this project, artists take empty houses scattered about residential areas and turn the spaces themselves into works of art, weaving in history and memories of the period when the buildings were lived in and used. Going from one of the houses to another, visitors pass through the Honmura district, where everyday life unfolds around them, in the process not only engaging with works of art but also sensing the layers of time and history interwoven in the community and the fabric of local people's lives. A notable feature of the Art House Project is that because viewing it means traversing a zone of daily life, it acts as a catalyst for interaction between visitors and local residents, giving rise to many a memorable episode. A truly organic project that changes day-to-day, it has evolved to present a new model of community, characterized by positive interaction between urban and rural, young and old, residents, and visitors.

Teshima Museum

Uniting the creative visions of artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, Teshima Art Museum stands on a hill on the island of Teshima overlooking the Seto Inland Sea. The museum, which resembles a water droplet at the moment of landing, is located in the corner of a rice terrace that was restored in collaboration with local residents.
Structurally, the building consists of a concrete shell, devoid of pillars, coving a space about 40 by 60 meters and with a maximum height of 4.3 meters. Two oval openings in the shell allow wind, sounds, and light of the world outside into this organic space where nature and architecture intimately interconnect. In the interior space, water continuously springs from the ground in a day long motion. This setting, in which nature, art and architecture come together with such limitless harmony, conjures an infinite array of impressions with the passage of seasons and the flow of time.

Art House Project

Inujima "Art House Project" was launched with the objective of inspiring the local community of Inujima, allowing them to experience the beautiful landscapes of everyday life and the familiar natural environments that extend beyond the artworks.
Three galleries, F-Art House, S-Art House, and I-Art House, designed for special displays, and Nakanotani Gazebo (a rest area) were first opened on the island in 2010. In 2013, with the opening of two new galleries, A-Art House and C-Art House, works are shown at each venue and elsewhere around the village. The galleries, scattered around the area, are constructed out of a diverse range of materials including roofing tiles and other components of old houses, transparent acrylic glass and aluminum that reflects the landscape.