Art House Project

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About Art House Project

The Art House Project, Ie Purojekuto in Japanese, occupies empty houses in the Honmura neighborhood, the old fishing and merchant village on the east of Naoshima. Since the late 1990s, artists have been invited to transform each building into a work of art, using the history of the place and the house itself as material.

At Kadoya, a house of about 200 years, Tatsuo Miyajima installed digital counters in a water tank, with numbers adjusted by local residents. Minamidera was designed by Tadao Ando for a work by James Turrell: you enter a completely dark space and, after a few minutes, the eyes begin to perceive light. At the Go'o shrine, Hiroshi Sugimoto reimagined the shrine with a glass staircase that descends to a stone chamber beneath the ground.

Other houses include Haisha, a former dentist’s clinic covered in collages by Shinro Ohtake; Ishibashi, with paintings by Hiroshi Senju; and Gokaisho, with wooden flowers by Yoshihiro Suda. Kinza receives few visitors at a time and requires its own reservation.

The common ticket gives access to the open houses, and the visit is done on foot, following the maps from the information center. Between houses, Honmura’s streets have dark wooden houses with family name plaques on the façades, an old castle atop a hill, and small cafés. The Ando Museum, in a traditional house with a concrete interior, is in the same neighborhood.