Naoshima in late spring: when architecture breathes and time stands still

I didn’t do much. I cycled across Naoshima island, drifting up gentle slopes where ivy masked the signs and front doors remained unlocked, shoes left outside. I paused beside a gate hung with a wind chime, listened to its uneven song, then let it vanish.

It’s the meaningless things I remember most.

Contemporary art dots the island. Yayoi Kusama’s colossal, spotted yellow pumpkin stands alone at the water’s edge, as if it had floated ashore from a dream.

The architecture here feels like haiku carved in stone—stark, cool, yet strangely tender. Not beautiful in a decorative way, but beautiful in how it demands presence. Tadao Ando needs little to express much. His concrete walls offer a philosophy of their own: firm, open, defined, yet boundless. They made me realise that silence is not the absence of sound; it’s a fullness, so complete that nothing more is required.

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In the afternoon, I stopped by the Lee Ufan Museum. The work sat quietly in the grass—no fence, no guard, no elaborate signage. I wasn’t sure if I was inside it, or simply nearby. Before me stood a long pane of tilted glass, reflecting the pale sky. A single cloud drifted by. Slowly. I caught my reflection in the surface, slightly warped, unclear.

But somehow more honest.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, who uses light to capture the passage of time, once wrote: “Time does not pass; we are the ones who disappear into it.” He photographs the ocean like a memory—still, distant, unreachable. No motion. No narrative. Only presence.

I stayed for a while, trying to dissolve into the scene, like mist folding into sea, like stone sinking into light.

The Japanese have a word for this: ma (間)—void. Not emptiness, but the presence of something yet to be filled.

Naoshima is made of such intervals. The space between two artworks. Between two people who say nothing. Between brightness and shadow. Between what is seen, and what prefers to remain unseen.

Late night, under a canopy of stars.

I wandered into a restaurant where the scent of fresh dashi lingered. The owner was wiry, with just enough English to ask if I’d like more rice. The grilled mackerel was rich with salt and oil; the miso soup held a subtle sweetness, dotted with tiny clams from the Seto Inland Sea. I ate slowly, sensing that if I hurried, I might miss something delicate rising with the steam.

On the café wall hung an old photograph. A pier. A man in a hat, his back turned. No caption.

A week on the island didn’t transform me. But it steadied something. I left with:

one deep breath
an old wooden chair no one sits in
and the sense that it’s enough just to be

Here, one simply exists.

The night before I left, I returned to the ferry terminal. Not to meet anyone. Not to travel. Just to sit, as the mist began to fall and the day quietly unraveled.

The sodium lights threw a pale yellow haze over the damp road. The ferryman sat on a wooden porch, wrapped in a thick coat, cigarette in hand. He looked out across the sea, now erased by mist. The line between sky and water had vanished.

I’m no longer sure where I’m looking in Naoshima. Smoke lifted, folding into the fog, as though the two had never been separate. Everything became soft around the edges. What I’d just experienced, and the me still standing in it. There was no clear line between today and yesterday, no firm boundary between memory and moment. Time stretched gently, asking for no resolution.

Hands tucked in my pockets, I breathed lightly, not wanting to disturb the stillness. In that grey veil, the abstract became almost tender.

And perhaps, in that quiet withholding, I found a kind of freedom.

PS: Ichi-go ichi-e—each moment comes only once.

Article adapted from the original piece in Tatler Vietnam, April 2025 issue

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