Shimane Art Museum (島根県立美術館)

The museum opened on 6 March 1999 in Matsue, on the shore of Lake Shinji. It took over the art collections of the Shimane Prefectural Museum that preceded it, a building by Kiyonori Kikutake completed in 1958 and now the prefecture's third annex.

The museum's basic concept was set in February 1994; in November, ten participants were selected for an architectural competition. In April 1995, the scheme by Kikutake's office was chosen as the best entry. Construction began in October 1996 and the main works were completed in June 1998.

After the former museum, Kikutake took part in building the prefectural library (completed in 1968) and the prefectural martial arts hall (1970): with the two museums, four of his public buildings can be seen in Matsue.

The art museum stands on the site of a primary school completed in 1962. The year before, Kikutake, who had come to the prefecture to design a building for the great shrine of Izumo (Izumo Taisha, 出雲大社), had been asked for his opinion on building that school: the site was then a very uneven dune, and his advice led to a change in the school's basic design.

The museum closed on 25 May 2021 for major renovation works and reopened on 1 June 2022.

The building has two storeys above ground and a maximum height of 15.5 m. Its structure is steel-framed reinforced concrete, partly steel. It covers 9,312 m2 on the ground for 12,499 m2 of floor area, on a 14,746 m2 plot.

Its shape evokes the "nagisa", the shore where water meets land. The large titanium roof softly reflects the sunlight; seen from the opposite shore, it stays low so as not to hide the mountains in the background. A circular opening in it forms a viewing terrace.

The main entrance is placed out of the winter north-west wind. It leads into a lobby with a high ceiling of gentle, wave-like curves: as soon as visitors step in, the lake spreads out in front of them, and they reach the exhibition rooms with the lake still in view. In clear weather the sunset can be seen from the lobby.

Kikutake attached great importance to the entrance and the lobby, so that local people could come to a public building as easily as in their daily lives; thirty years earlier he had already taken the same care over the entrance and lobby of the prefectural library. He said that his thinking at Izumo in the 1950s and 1960s had been his starting point, and onto the large, gently sloping roof of this museum he laid the image of the serene breadth of ancient Izumo.

This is the art museum of Shimane Prefecture, whose theme is harmony with water. Its collecting concentrates on five fields: paintings with water as their subject, Japanese prints, photographs from Japan and abroad, sculpture in wood, and the art of Shimane.

The Hokusai holdings include, among others, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the Hokusai Manga and paintings from different periods of his life. Sculptures are also shown outdoors, notably on a lawn beside the lake.

The ground-floor lobby, the shop, the library and the restaurant can be used without a ticket, as can the outdoor sculpture area; a ticket is required for the exhibition rooms and the viewing terrace.

The museum opens at 10 am. It closes at 6.30 pm from October to February and half an hour after sunset from March to September; admission to the rooms stops half an hour before closing. It is closed on Tuesdays and from 28 December to 1 January, and these days may change according to the exhibition schedule.

The museum is about a fifteen-minute walk from JR Matsue Station.