4380 Travel Guide

'Distant Memory' is an art installation on the Seto Inland Sea islands of Shodo District, Kagawa Prefecture, related to the Setouchi Triennale and themed on 'memory'. The work blends with the islands' natural scenery, using material and space to stir thoughts of the past and of time, and is one of the more talked-about pieces on the islands during the festival. Visits can be planned with the festival map and ferry routes, together with other works and scenery around Shodoshima and Teshima.

Vessel of the Sea (Umi no Utsuwa) by Nobuho Nagasawa has appeared at the Setouchi Triennale since 2013 (work sd57 since 2022). Set in houses and warehouses around Aketoyama on Shodoshima, a blue boat hangs in a darkened space amid the sound of tides, and visitors may climb aboard and lie down within it.

'Star Anger' is a large outdoor installation on Shodoshima for the Setouchi Triennale, using dramatic form and metallic light to probe the tension and symbiosis between humanity, the cosmos and nature. Set on an open hillside or coast, visitors circle its mass and feel energy released through the contrast of material and scale. It is both a high-impact stop on the island's art map and a face of the Seto Inland Sea's 'island and art' story.

The Shodoshima Katachi Lab, or The Island Lab, was made by the Osaka creative studio graf for the first Setouchi Triennale in 2010, inside the disused century-old Yamayoshi soy sauce house in the Hishio no Sato district. Little was changed outside; inside, graf effectively brought the whole island in. Contour maps and terrain sections, an exploded diagram of a soy sauce barrel, collected stones and timber, cherry varieties, olive leaves, native plants, island sound recordings and a survey of what residents ate at breakfast, lunch and dinner are all classified and laid out through the old rooms. They called the show an exchange of everyday viewpoints, using architectural and design research to build a visible, audible, touchable archive of an island that was once one of Japan's four great soy sauce producers and has since seen that industry fade. graf is also the team behind A to Z with Yoshitomo Nara and the I love Yu bathhouse with Shinro Ohtake on Naoshima; this work is cooler than those, more laboratory than installation. It is a festival-period work: outside the triennale the islands schedule separate viewing days and it has no confirmed daily opening hours. Without a current public schedule, the reliable plan is a half-day through the permanent sights of Hishio no Sato, the Marukin Soy Sauce museum, the old brewery warehouses and the outdoor works around Maki and Noma.

Often misdescribed in Chinese guides as an exposed-concrete sculpture, the Hut with a Large Curved Surface is in fact a public toilet designed for the 2013 Setouchi Triennale by Osaka architect Yo Shimada of Tato Architects, listed as work sd24 and kept on as a permanent facility in the Maki settlement of Hishio no Sato. It answers the huge cedar vats inside the local soy sauce warehouses: a single white steel plate is bent into a soft, cloth-like curving wall that separates the men's, women's and accessible cubicles. Above it sits an independent traditional gabled tile roof, tiled to match the neighbouring houses but mixing smoked and glass tiles. By day the two look alike; at night the interior light glows through the glass ones. The curved wall was prefabricated off site while foundations were poured in parallel, allowing the whole building to be finished in two months, and an FRP deck under the roof lets daylight filter down as if through leaves. It is the most modest kind of festival work: built not to be looked at but to be used, with the space discovered in the course of an ordinary visit. Free, open at all hours, no Art Passport needed.

'Particles in the Air / Karato' (Sora no Tsubu) is a permanent Setouchi Triennale work (No. te08) by Japanese artist Noe Aoki, standing at Karato-oka on Teshima island beside the Karato spring — not on Shodoshima itself. Legend says Kobo Daishi struck the ground here to release the 'Reisen Echisui' spring, whose constant-temperature water feeds the island's rice terraces; in 1929 four stone basins were built with strictly separated uses for drinking, washing vegetables and laundry, and the site remains a centre of local life and worship. Aoki linked weathering-steel rings that rise from the lid of an old water tank, the open circles slicing the sky into dancing 'particles' that seem to welcome rain and echo the island's water cycle. Explanatory panels and viewing platforms stand nearby; low morning or evening light reveals the lines best.