The Inujima Art Project
As I initially came across Inujima, a small isolated island set in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea in 1995, I stumbled upon the abandoned industrial ruins of a copper refinery that had once been instrumental in modernizing Japan. Intuitively, I conceived of an experimental art project that would breathe new life into the island through the use of natural energies and art, in an attempt to question the prevailing modern value systems. Why natural energies and community regeneration? Among the ruins of the island’s erstwhile copper refinery and power-plant, it is easy to imagine the enormous amounts of soot and smoke emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels; to this very day scant vegetation is to be seen on much of the site on which these ruins stand. The economic model for exploiting energy from fossil fuels extracted from the earth is already beyond redemption. It is blatantly clear that we have arrived at a critical phase in our existence, where we have to seek a viable and sustainable economic model. Moreover, the fact that industrial waste would be dumped in the ruins spurred me into action. Illegal dumping of industrial waste was beginning to become apparent in the immediate vicinity of the island. Even on this small isolated island, I could witness before my very eyes how distant urban consumption practices engendered sacrifices that isolated, regional communities had to make. Why Art on a Japanese Island? During the period I worked as an artist in New York, society was increasingly witnessing a collusion between the art world and capitalism. Intuitively, I decided to leave New York to return to Japan just before 9.11. Perhaps, this was due to the fact that I no longer wished to dance in the midst of globalism fuelled by capitalism. Or again, it may have been a spiritual craving for a place linked to my roots in which I could express myself. It was at this juncture that I stumbled across Inujima. Located on the periphery rather than in the centre, set amidst the Japanese archipelago on the fringes of the Eurasian landmass, it was here, with the sea all around me, that I wanted to attempt to create something. Prior to conceiving a project for a remote island in Japan’s Inland Sea, in 1996 I had realized a project on Alcatraz Island, the world-renowned prison camp in San Francisco Bay. What inspired me for that project was the fact that a second-generation Japanese-American had been detained for 16 years there in the aftermath of the Pacific War, charged with treason against the United States, although some claimed he was falsely accused; yet, it was not alone amid the many such extreme events confined to such remote islands. Inujima symbolized a by-product of the ongoing process to modernize Japan as a nation-state. And yet, the island’s elderly community was sharing their day-to-day life with eight million gods and goddesses, living together on this small, secluded island.

Remote island, centre and periphery
Industrial ruins dating from the modernizing era, ageing islanders’ everyday
Natural energies and environmental regeneration technologies,
Employ the island’s natural resources
and Yukio Mishima

With its plurality of interwoven layers, the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum holds a message for Japan’s post-war generations. The thirteen long years it took to complete the project, from blueprint to its realization, prepared me for the encounter with the unexpected source of raw materials: the derelict ruins of Yukio Mishima’s former residence in Tokyo, in which he had lived from the age of twelve to twenty-five. In addition to the museum’s underground gallery showing “Icarus” in “Sun and Steel”, the body was given to embody “The voice of the heroic dead” and “the last manifesto.

“Why Yukio Mishima on Inujima? “
What has Japan lost through the process of westernization? What did Japan lose sight of in its rush towards economic prosperity under post-war Japan-U.S. Security Arrangements? The messages Mishima left behind as a criticism of Japan’s post-war democracy became an integral part of the concept of Inujima project. Even the idea of combining natural energies and environmental regeneration through artistic initiatives can only be a fusion with engineering. I need to instill the notion of art =spirit. The actors required to create a device to reflect on “Japan” on the stage of the ruins of modernization were all present. With a new husk, the derelict house of the novelist representing the Showa era, Inujima Seirensho Art Museum serves as a point of contact with both the dead and those yet to be born. And, the principal image of the museum is closely integrated with the architecture as an inclusive force. Mishima’s three-tatami-sized reading room was suspended above a water basin constructed from forty tons of Inujima rock–the island is well-known for producing boulders. Covered in jet-black slag collected from the refinery’s ruins, the facade of the author’s abandoned house symbolized a blackened sun during a total solar eclipse. The dynamic force of the chimney stacks standing erect against the sky, confronting the blazing suns of the underground labyrinth, evoked blast furnaces; along with the fleeing Icarus, the air currents took flight to escape the labyrinth of mirrors. The six tatami mats screening the air awaken darkness to the curses of the dead, while those eight sun-bleached tatami mats exposed to the Seto Inland Sea’s sunlight proclaim without warning a glowing written appeal from a Pandora’s box. Flying away from that subterranean labyrinth, what did Icarus think at that very moment he came too close to the sun, as his wings melted and he was flung back down to earth? The result of my unexpected encounter with Yukio Mishima’s abandoned house in Tok yo was that it was reincarnated as an artwork on a peripheral, remote island. In other words, when I stumbled upon the industrial ruins on Inujima, Mishima breathed new life into the island in the guise of the Seirensho Art Museum.
Yukinori Yanagi 15 August 2016
Yukinori Yanagi “Wandering Position”, 2016, published by BankART 1929