Museum of the Light (光の美術館)

The Museum of the Light (光の美術館) is one of the buildings of the Kiyoharu Art Colony (清春芸術村) at Nagasaka (長坂町), in the city of Hokuto (北杜市), Yamanashi Prefecture, on the southern foot of the Yatsugatake (八ヶ岳). The art dealer Chouzou Yoshii (吉井長三, 1930-2016) created this cultural complex on the site of the former Kiyoharu Elementary School, where one finds architecture by Gustave Eiffel, Yoshio Taniguchi, Tadao Ando (安藤忠雄) and Terunobu Fujimori.

Yoshii was the client of the museum, designed by Ando's office (安藤忠雄建築研究所) with the firm K計画事務所 and built by the contractor 早野組. The museum opened in April 2011. Yamanashi Prefecture awarded it in 2011 an encouragement prize of its architecture prize (山梨県建築文化賞, 建築文化奨励賞).

The place is associated with Antoni Clavé (アントニ・クラーベ), a Spanish painter who worked with Picasso and was hailed as his successor. Yoshii himself had brought to Japan, among others, works by Clavé, and the building draws on the painter's studio.

The building is a construction of bare reinforced concrete, two storeys above ground with 120.91 m2 of floor area. Its exterior is compact, but the interior gives an impression of spaciousness, thanks to the layout and design of the staircase and to a continuous opening that runs from the roof to the corner of the wall.

There is no artificial lighting in the rooms: the sun alone lights the exhibition space, through one corner of the ceiling and through several slits, and the light changes with the seasons, the weather and the sun's course. One exhibition room is on the first floor.

The museum hosts contemporary art exhibitions. In 2019, the scientist and artist Akira Wakita (脇田玲) presented "PHOTONS" there: in the space designed by Ando, he wanted to make visitors aware of the presence of photons, until "space ceases to be space and light ceases to be light".

The museum is open from 10 am to 5 pm (last admission 4:30 pm). It is closed on Mondays; when the Monday is a public holiday, the closure falls on the following weekday. It is also closed at the turn of the year. Admission is the art colony's paid entrance fee, free for primary and middle-school pupils; it also covers the Kiyoharu Shirakaba Museum (清春白樺美術館) and the Rouault Chapel (ルオー礼拝堂), and is paid in cash.

You can come by car (15 minutes from the Nagasaka interchange, a car park of 30 spaces) or by train: from JR Nagasaka Station (長坂駅) it is 5 minutes by taxi, 10 minutes by community bus or 30 minutes on foot.