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Setonaikai NP, Kagawa
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
To preserve the Seto Inland Sea view, Chichu was buried in a hill whose old terraced salt-pan remains were kept intact. Only about 35 m² of its roughly 2,500 m² floor area shows above ground.
Chichu’s spark was a single Monet: Soichiro Fukutake’s acquisition of a vast 2 × 6 m Water-Lily Pond helped set the museum project in motion. The team then planned how to display it in its surroundings.
Naoshima had no plant that could make the museum’s required concrete, so all 8,000 m³ came by ferry from Okayama. Each ferry carried only 6 mixer trucks, limiting pours to about 100 m³ a day.
One 2.2 m sphere and 27 gilded wooden forms make up the heart of Walter De Maria’s whole-room artwork. A ceiling opening lets daylight redraw its shadows as the hours pass.
Monet’s 5 late Water Lilies hang underground in a gallery illuminated only by natural light. Designers tested models and measured light to shape a room where weather and seasons alter the viewing.
Chichu Garden is a living companion to Monet’s Water Lilies: its roughly 150 kinds of flowers and 40 kinds of trees were selected after studying his Giverny paintings and records.
Monet’s gallery floor is a giant handmade mosaic: about 700,000 pieces of Italian Bianco Carrara marble, each only 2 cm square, were placed by hand beneath the paintings.
James Turrell’s 3 Chichu works span 36 years: Afrum, Pale Blue (1968), Open Field (2000), and Open Sky (2004). Together, they let visitors encounter light as his artistic medium across the decades.
Turrell’s Open Sky has a ceiling opening that exposes visitors to outdoor weather, even though they are underground. Its special 45-minute sunset viewing makes changing natural light part of the artwork.
