Postwar industrial development and environmental degradation The islands and cities that make up the triennale are located within the eastern portion of the Seto Inland Sea and the
Setonaikai National Park, which was established as Japan's first national park in 1934.
Founding of Benesse Art Site project In response to these environmental conditions, coupled with the challenges of aging and decreasing populations in the islands, Tetsuhiro Fukutake, founder of the Okayama-based Fukutake Publishing Co. (later
Benesse), met with Chikatsugu Miyake, then-mayor of Naoshima in 1985 to discuss a plan for redeveloping the southern portion of the island as a cultural and educational facility for children. Though Tetsuhiro died just months after the meeting, his son
Soichiro took on the project, which resulted in the construction of the Naoshima International Camp in 1989. Designed by architect
Tadao Ando, who helmed the designs of the major exhibition spaces across the islands, the campground would form the foundation of the Benesse Art Site, the collective title for the Benesse-initiated art projects on Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima.
Frog and Cat, a large-scale public sculpture by
Karel Appel was the first artwork to be installed on the island as part of the Benesse Art Site project in 1989. Under his vision that "economy is subordinate to culture," Fukutake continued to commission artists, curators, and architects and invest in cultural projects over the following decades. The Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum (now Benesse House), was established in 1992 to exhibit works from Fukutake's collection, followed by the Chichu Museum in 2004, which features site-specific installations by Walter de Maria and James Turrell, as well as four works from Claude Monet's
Water Lilies series. Both museums were designed by Tadao Ando, and feature his signature material of concrete while exhibiting a keen attentiveness towards environmental context, artistic content, and the affective potentials of space. Outside of Naoshima, both Fukutake's private foundation and the Benesse company have constructed other institutions such as the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum, built on the remains of a former coal refinery in 2008, and the
Teshima Art Museum, designed by
Ryue Nishizawa in 2010 to house
Rei Naito's
Matrix, the only work on view at the site. Talks of organizing an art festival in the Setouchi region began in 2004, when the Kagawa prefectural government approached governor Takeki Manabe with the idea of establishing a program that drew from the prefecture's artistic and architectural ties to figures such as sculptor
Isamu Noguchi, painter
Gen'ichiro Inokuma, and architect Kenzo Tange. Infrastructural development in the area during the late 1980s and 1990s, notably the construction of the
Great Seto Bridge and
Kansai International Airport further supported the proposal to invest in the festival as a key driver of tourism in the area.
Reception and effects of festival While the festival and the accompanying interstitial artistic interventions, craft and food fairs, and performances that take place both within and outside the "official" festival organized under the aegis of the Setouchi Triennale have brought a substantial amount of increased profit, tourism, and in some cases, population growth, not all communities included in the event have benefited equally from these interventions. Shiu Hong Simon Tu notes the limited effect on population and development that the festival has had in Inujima, which is geographically more remote and has stricter regulations on new construction under Okayama City's City Planning Act, in comparison to other islands such as Teshima and Ogijima, both of which have reported an increased population of newcomers who are actively engaged in the continued survival of the communities. As such, it is difficult to generalize the effects and role of the festival on the overall Setouchi region, as resident and tourist experiences, artistic approaches, and social contexts vary widely across the island and port city communities. ==Participating Islands and Cities==