Naoshima Onsen

Ferries to Naoshima Island leave from Uno Port on the Okayama coast, and the twenty-minute crossing gives you time to watch the island emerge from the Seto Inland Sea. From a distance, Naoshima looks like a regular small island of the type scattered throughout this stretch of water: forested hills, a few boat sheds, low houses along the shore. Then you pull into Miyanoura Port and the yellow pumpkin sculpture on the jetty, eight hundred kilograms of polka-dotted ceramic by Yayoi Kusama, establishes that something different is happening here. Since the 1990s, the island has been systematically transformed through a collaboration between Benesse Holdings and some of the more restless figures in contemporary art. The result is a place where you cannot be certain whether the old building you are walking past is an abandoned fish warehouse or a gallery, and where the bathhouse in the village center is a fully functioning public bath that doubles as one of the most exuberant art installations in Japan.

Naoshima Bath, which the artist Shinro Ohtake titled I Love Yu with a pun that works in both English and Japanese, opened in 2009. The exterior is a collage of found objects, ship parts, tiles, and painted signage that looks deliberately incomplete. Inside, the changing rooms give way to a bathing hall where every surface has been treated as a canvas. The walls carry large mosaic murals of ama, the traditional female free-divers who work this stretch of coast, rendered in vivid tile against deep blue backgrounds. The ceiling is painted glass in colors that shift the light inside the room depending on the time of day and the weather. At the center of the room, visible from both the men's and women's sides, stands Sadako, a full-scale elephant sculpture.

Sadako was not made for this building. Ohtake had owned the sculpture for years, and when a facility in Jozankei, Hokkaido where it had been displayed closed down, it needed somewhere to go. The solution, lowering a life-size elephant through the bathhouse ceiling by crane, is the kind of decision that only makes sense inside the particular logic of Naoshima. The water itself is ordinary public bath water, not a geothermal spring, heated and circulated in the conventional way. The admission fee is under 700 yen. Tattoos are permitted. Local islanders use it for the same reason anyone uses a neighborhood bathhouse.

That last detail is the point. The island has the Chichu Art Museum, the Lee Ufan Museum, the Benesse House overnight gallery. Those are considered, curated, reverent spaces. I Love Yu is none of those things. It is wet and loud and steam-filled and open to whoever shows up, and Ohtake built it with the stated intention that it should be genuinely used and loved by the people who live here. Soaking in the abalone-diver tiles with Sadako overhead while an elderly local man discusses his fishing gear with the attendant is a specific kind of cultural experience that you do not get in a gallery.