MIHO LETS ART SPEAK FOR ITSELF
One million visitors in a decade does not sound like much in today's realm of high-traffic art museums. But consider the location of the Miho Museum, which boasts this attendance: a thickly wooded nature preserve in the mountains more than an hour northeast of Kyoto.
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, the Miho has enhanced its customarily stellar selection of artworks with objects seen seldom, if ever before, even by repeat visitors to the museum.
The Miho, named for its late founder, Mihoko Koyama (1910-2003), takes to the limit an assumption on which most museums in the West casually conduct themselves these days: that exposure to art betters people's lives, perhaps even their character. This curious article of faith has diffuse roots in Western culture, but in the Miho's case, it stems explicitly from Koyama's spiritual teacher, Mokichi Okada (1882-1955).
Contrary to current Western museum practice, the Miho minimizes explanatory text, assuming that the highest achievements of art communicate a soul-elevating clarity and bliss, not through earmarks of style but by sheer emanation of creative brilliance. Not many museum collections could support such a purist viewpoint, but the Miho's cuts across Western and Asian antiquities at an extraordinarily high level. (For its 10th anniversary, the museum has added a little more contextual material than it usually posts.)
Anyone who imbibes the radiance of outstandingly beautiful things, the thinking goes, will recognize nature and individuals as the truly irreplaceable treasures of which great artifacts serve as symbols.
In an urban American setting, this viewpoint may sound like promotional twaddle. But it regains plausibility deep in the tree-shrouded mountains of Shiga Prefecture, in a building that I. M. Pei, the Miho's architect, calls the favorite project of his long career.
Pei put in an appearance at the Miho's 10th anniversary festivities, uncannily sharp and robust at 90.
Visitors reach the Miho - after a 40-minute taxi or shuttle bus ride from the nearest town, Otsu - only by walking through a pedestrian tunnel - a sort of rebirth canal - and crossing a short suspension bridge over a verdant ravine. No art presents itself at the museum's entrance level, only a view through pine trees across the valley beyond. These vistas serve as calming preparation for encounters with the artworks within.
Western classical art, East Asian, Southeast and West Asian antiquities have pride of place, with many objects isolated in cases of their own, the better to sideline distractions from the beauty of the things themselves. This approach seems obviously to prove itself in an object of breathtaking elegance - such as a subtly iridescent, black-glaze Song Dynasty tea bowl, one of the most prized Chinese ceramics in existence.
But the Miho collection - still little more than 1,000 objects - ranges from examples of high style, such as the Song tea bowl and an expansive and pristine Persian "Medallion and Animal Carpet" (16th-17th century), to humble things as rough as the Tokoname ware 12th century ceramic "Jar with Three Horizontal Grooves," one of the most soulful objects the museum owns. It wears a gash in its side as a badge of aesthetic honor, a triumph of character over functionality.
The idea that an object supremely well-selected and presented can spiritually re-orient the person who sees it presupposes an innate sensibility in viewers, awaiting re-awakening, possibly repressed or damaged by individual life experience. It may even presuppose an inherently harmonious underlying order in the universe, with which we lose contact at our peril.
So perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the Miho grows out of a spiritual fellowship, known as Shinji Shumeikai, that sees beauty in art and nature as furthering the preference for peace over conflict, for attention over addictive distractions.
Parts of the Japan headquarters of Shinji Shumeikai, known as Misono, come in view, over a piney ridge, as one enters the museum: a bell tower by Pei and the top of a sort of modernist temple built in 1983 by Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), architect of the World Trade Center.
Shinji Shumeikai's critics call it a cult, not least because it proclaims as its mission the creation of heaven on earth, the sort of utopian aspiration that makes everyone wary of groupthink uneasy. The organization insists that it merely adheres to Okada's ideal of delivering the world from poverty, illness and conflict.
No one can accuse Shumei International, the group's umbrella organization, of shirking fundamental issues of our time.
A symposium on the occasion of the Miho's 10th anniversary drew together the threads of art, global environmental concern and organic farming, the three threads of Shumei's current program.
The discussion included some dire predictions about climate change and the drift of world events by speakers who included Maurice Strong, former undersecretary of the United Nations and organizer of the conference that produced the so-called Kyoto protocols, and Patrick Holden, director of Britain's Soil Association.
Putting its resources where its philosophy leads, Shumei's latest venture is Shigaraki no Sato, an organic farm not far from the Miho that now supplies all the food served at the museum's restaurant.
Its mountain location and other seasonal considerations limit the Miho's visiting hours. Before planning a visit, travelers should consult the museum's Web site: www.miho.or.jp.