Secreted away behind carparks, low-rise homes and strip malls, a series of modular, pastel-hued cuboids sits, like connected islands, on a shallow pool. Next to it, the mirrored façades of an elliptical building and a 180-metre-long wall, running parallel to the shoreline, reflect the surrounding environs, from the silhouette of undulating hills to the steel blue waters of Hiroshima Bay. Within the oval structure that serves as the main entrance hall, floor-to-ceiling windows reinforce the impression of envelopment by nature, while Y-shaped columns, supporting a canopy of interlocking wooden beams overhead, evoke the presence of serene arboreal behemoths. The sublimely photogenic Simose Art Museum, designed by celebrated architect Shigeru Ban, opened in 2023 in the city of Otake, a coastal industrial centre in Hiroshima prefecture, Japan. It won in the ‘World’s Most Beautiful Museums’ category of the Prix Versailles the following year, where it was one of seven nominees for the prestigious architecture and design prize awarded at UNESCO.

Founded by Yumiko Shimose, the president of Marui Sangyo Corporation, the Simose complex features several components: the entrance building, exhibition halls and an administrative section for the museum, as well as a number of villas, also designed by Ban, that are open to guests, and extensive gardens of seasonal flowers and plants.

Following a show of traditional Japanese dolls, the museum organized its first contemporary exhibition in April this year, titled Ambient, Environment, Circumstances – The Topography of Contemporary Art. The project was helmed by chief curator Keita Saito, with the collaboration of guest curators Takanori Matsuyama, Li Jingwen and Yoko Negami. It brings together nine artists from countries across East and Southeast Asia, including Japan, South Korea, greater China, Indonesia and, notably, Myanmar. At its conceptual core lies the Japanese term kankyo, which denotes one’s environment or circumstances. The curatorial team noted in an email to STIR that the show expands the concept of kankyo to betoken a “space for expression” and its premise “reimagines this space through research-led practices and works”. They point out, for instance, that Kaori Endo’s Torno • Tortus (Tour to Turn) (2025) incorporates ceramic components from her research in Miyajima, Hiroshima and South Korea, while Muhamad Gerly’s installation, Letters as a Living Culture “Overlaps” (2025), utilises heritage washi paper handmade in Otake and Hiroshima, a result of his visits to the workshops of local craftsmen.

The exhibition also aims to engage “in dialogue with its surroundings”, with ‘surroundings’ broadly gesturing to widening spatial and geographic realms, from the museum’s campus, to its location across from Miyajima, or Shrine Island, a prominent cultural landmark and tourist destination in the bay, to the rest of Asia. Given its constellation of thematic strands, the show is at its most cogent when allowing connections to be drawn between the art and its immediate physical context. Soe Yu Nwe’s ceramic sculptures refer to the socio-politics of her native Myanmar, with The One Who Perceives the Sounds of the World “Kannon x Naga Maedaw, Shigaraki” (2025) amalgamating the titular deities – the bodhisattva Kannon, or Guanyin and the Burmese goddess of dragons, Naga Maedaw – in a gesture of transformation. Its chained state recalls an old rumour in Yangon behind the handcuffing of the icons of a nat (spirit), Mya Nan Nwe, who is said to have appeared in a nightmare to the former dictator, Than Shwe, following which he ordered her statues to be restrained to preempt paranormal mischief. The mirrored pedestals that the sculptures rest on highlight their almost grotesque exquisiteness and suggest, at the same time, the prevalence of watery and mirrored surfaces around Simose. Omyo Cho’s Nudi hallucination works (both 2022) are fabricated from industrial materials such as stainless steel, silver and glass, their biomorphic, delicately shaped forms alluding to the natural world around the museum and the interplay between the synthetic and organic.

The materiality of Cho’s objects suggests, at the same time, the flip side of the coin. Belying the museum’s picturesque setting of refined gardens and gently rippling waters, with a view of lush highlands in the distance, is the fact that Simose is itself a carefully curated island set in the midst of an urban-industrial landscape. It is hidden from view along the main thoroughfare running through the city by suburban sprawl, concealed behind a mall – the Youme Town chain ubiquitous to many Japanese cities – and a massive home improvement depot, as well as expansive strips of parking lots. Otake is also home to several large companies specialising in pulp and petrochemicals. A mere stone’s throw away from the museum, its towering red-and-white smokestacks visible along the bend of the shoreline, is an industrial plant owned and operated by the Mitsubishi Chemical Group.

This industry-driven, consumer-oriented reality seems to provide an unspoken subtext to other works in the exhibition. Sou Suzuki, an artist who started in fashion and stage costuming, translates his body-oriented designs into sculptural entities that, according to the work's description, “resist binary oppositions – between figuration and abstraction, nature and the human”. His Untitled (Non-homogeneous arrangement) series (2017–21) consists of a suite of discarded objects, often textiles, trapped in vacuum-sealed compression bags, their contorted shapes seeming anthropomorphically abject. Here, these pieces are shown with the cardboard boxes they arrived in, postage stickers and stamps left intact. Tianyi Zheng’s My Shadow on Your Dust (2025), which conjures up a microcosmos of second-hand objects, consists of an installation of discarded and recycled detritus animated with light and sound by automation systems; an immersive installation that meticulously duplicates the interior of a Hiroshima recycling shop. The leftovers of mass consumerism in Suzuki’s and Zheng’s works function as reminders of the city that lies beyond the confines of the museum, forlorn fragments of capitalist, urban lifeworlds.

There are, finally, works by several artists that do not seem to find a comfortable fit within the exhibition’s curatorial logic, yet represent intriguing, playful visions. Of Japanese-Filipino parentage, born in Singapore and raised in Japan, Daichi Kukita’s paintings draw on images from art history, duplicating figures or motifs in a “software-like approach”. In Repetition_The Swing 02 (2025), elements of Jean-Honore Fragonard’s The Swing (around 1767–8) – the billowing gown of the female figure and the seat of her swing – are isolated, recreated, amplified and repeated, a pointed jab at the reproducibility and proliferation of images in contemporary visuality. Like Kukita, Kim Riyoo looks backwards for stimulus. He borrows from Japanese history the distinctive forms of Jomon pottery and Yayoi vessels for his sculptures, imbuing them with an uncanny sense of life – in the manner of Pokémon creatures, or yokai, supernatural beings that include monsters, goblins and imps. A portrait with the eye that stare into void (2023), for example, is based on the shape of dotaku, bronze ceremonial bells produced in the late Yayoi era (around 200 BCE – 200 CE), with the addition of an oculus that peers enigmatically back at the viewer.

Ambient, Environment, Circumstances is a graceful presentation with a surprisingly critical spirit underpinning its polished appearance. It channels the elegance of its setting and its space, while simultaneously hinting at the asymmetry between the cloistered existence of the museum complex and the mundane, industrial actuality of the city around it. Ultimately, the exhibition is upstaged by the state-of-the-art architectural aesthetics and spectacular, superlative surrounds of the Simose Museum – the most conspicuously remarkable work on display.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

‘Ambient, Environment, Circumstances – The Topography of Contemporary Art’ is on view from April 26 - July 21, 2025, at The Simose Art Museum, Otake, Japan.