Kyoto Garden of Fine Arts

A must-see in Kyoto for modern architecture fans! The Kyoto Garden of Fine Arts was designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The garden displays reproductions of famous masterpieces on ceramic tiles: The Last Judgement by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Renoir's Two Sisters, and others. I visited it on a grey day, and I imagine that the blue skies would change the experience considerably, but I liked it as it was.

Calling this place a garden is a wee bit misleading. My mental image of a garden is a place filled with vegetation, but here you will find only water plants growing on the cascade wall and a view of the trees from the adjacent Botanical Gardens, which, I guess, falls under the Japanese concept of shakkei 借景, or "borrowed scenery" (making use of the surrounding landscape as a part of the design of a garden). Also, the sounds of water add an interesting dimension to the experience.

What makes the Garden of Fine Arts Kyoto quietly extraordinary is how it asks you to encounter familiar images in an unfamiliar way. Unlike paintings in a hushed gallery, these are ceramic-tile reproductions placed at the scale of architecture, set against concrete, sky, and water. Seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper reflected in a shallow pool is a different, more spatial kind of looking.

kyoto-toban-hp.or.jp (Japanese only)