French philosopher Bachelard once said, “By changing space, by leaving the realm of one’s usual sensibilities, we change our nature.” Bachelard was undeniably correct in saying that such changes in our direct surroundings often trigger powerful and intensely emotional responses in our being, and little might he have known that he also prophesised one of the greatest shifts in the contemporary art world. Over the past sixteen years, more than 225 private museums of contemporary art have opened across the globe from Brazil to South Korea. This is no longer the world of pristine gallery spaces nestled in cosmopolitan cities but rather one of far-flung private art museums, of immersive and deconstructed art that springs up in the most unexpected of places. Perhaps we all grew a little tired of the eternal, frantic frenzy of the international art scene, of long haul flights from one saturated fair to the next, a constant cat-and-mouse game of buyers, sellers, artists, wannabes, have-beens, and all the in betweens, each bustling for their moment in the spotlight.

And so entered the art pilgrimage. During these treks into faraway lands, museums themselves become the destination. It’s the particular flavour of the nearby environment that seeps in through your pores and alters your sensibilities. Your nature changes. Your body prepares itself to absorb art as a blank slate.

In the remote islands of Japan’s misty Seto Inland Sea, over the past 30 years an art mecca has slowly sunk into the hills and cascaded down into abandoned wooden fishing villages and small towns with ageing populations. This project began in 1987 when Soichiro Fukutake, a Japanese billionaire art-lover whose company specialised in test prep and language schools purchased the south area of Naoshima island. Along with two other islands, Teshima and Inujima, the complex makes up The Benesse Art Site. Benesse means “living well”, in homage to the project’s grandiose, and largely successful, attempt to rejuvenate this once prosperous region of Japan.

As I travelled to Naoshima from Kyoto, hopping first on a bullet train, then onto a slower, decidedly more archaic local train that clanged along rusty tracks towards the sea, and boarded a ferry which left me at one of the island’s harbours, I already felt my state of mind changing. Many of Naoshima’s main sites can be reached by foot along quiet country roads lined with bright pink cherry blossoms and chirping spring birds, and as I strolled I pondered on the slogan of the museums, “Art must exist amidst nature”. It surely felt that way. The Chichu Museum (quite literally meaning “in the ground”) up ahead had been designed by Pritzker-Prize winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, much like many of the buildings on the islands. Ando is known for his adherence to the art/nature simbiosis which follows the natural forms and flows of the land and for their minimalist cement structures which create frames of natural light and empty space which elevate you into states of contemplative meditation. His works have been likened to temples due to their stripped back spiritual simplicity influenced by Zen Buddhist philosophy and wabi-sabi aesthetics.

One enters the Chichu Museum through a series of lofty cement passageways with unpredictable sharp bends and long approaches which slowly guide you into the subterranean chambers below, slipping into corridors dug deep into the earth. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that this echoed where we also came from, man’s journey in life. I had entered the trance of the art pilgrim. My mind quietened, my senses were heightened, and the subtlest change of light brought on overwhelming emotions. Other people walked around me but they were dark shadows, mystical silhouettes illuminated by the natural light which drifted in through the precise openings carved in the building’s body. The museum pulled me into its spell, revealing itself slowly, layer by layer, room by room.

The main works in Chichu confront nature, meaning that they interpret the natural world and translate it into art. Monet’s giant work, the Water Lily Pond, is set inside a bright white Carrara marble chamber with cornerless walls and whose museum attendants are dressed in white lab coats (in a loop of life imitating art, a garden modelled on Monet’s gardens lies in the museum grounds). There are also three works by James Turrell; in one of these called “Open Field” you enter a smoky blue room into imperceptible depths where the light envelops you and makes you feel like you are floating into thin air. Walter De Maria, the pioneer of 1970s land art, has created a science fiction-like installation with a giant granite sphere sitting on a staircase surrounded by 27 golden sculptures.The distinction between the real world and art doesn’t exist here, and I may as well have just landed on another planet entirely.

Also designed by Ando and surrounded by the open hills and the cold ocean, the Lee Ufan museum houses paintings and sculptures dedicated to the Korean artist; in one piece, the whole world is contained in the shadow of a rock. It’s difficult to explain with words exactly how this is achieved. It’s a work that must be experienced for itself. The Bennesse House Museum close by is another hotel and gallery space where guests can roam about at night in their slippers and bathrobes, with no red tape or security guards to stand between them and works by Keith Haring, Giacometti, Cy Twombly, and Frank Stella.

In the sleepy villages dotted around Naoshima abandoned houses have been intervened by the Art House Project. Instillations permeate the interior spaces of the wooden huts but leave the exteriors largely untouched, so that the art is seamlessly woven into the fabric of the local towns and landscapes, not clashing with what was already there. Even mundane objects like straw baskets or paper flowers are transformed by the mere virtue of this phenomenological setting. Inujima island also has its own Art House project and a museum which houses the remains of an old copper refinery, “using what exists, to create what is to be”.

My visit serendipitously coincided with the Setouchi Trienalle, a large-scale event that spills over into the countless small islands of the Seto sea. Ferry hopping is fun and upon arriving to Teshima I immediately boarded a shuttle to the Teshima Art Museum, a collaboration between the artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa (another Pritzker Prize winner). In a stupendous feat of engineering, the building is formed from a smooth concrete shell without pillars with two oval openings that allow the wind, rain, sounds and elements to flow through its structure and harmoniously connect the architecture with the organic world outside. The museum’s domed shape mimics a droplet that landed on the earth. Little globules of water bubble from the ground and groups of people stand there watching them in a trance, expectantly, hesitating, tensely waiting to see where each drop will flow and suddenly absorb into each another to form a whole new body, slinking down the cool cement to join larger puddles of water, permutations of the same whole (the work is called ‘The Matrix’ – everything is borne and nourished from it, a metaphor for man being reborn and newborn every time).

There are countless works of art to visit across the islands and each person is free to roam and discover their own personal way of experiencing them and interpreting their meanings. Personally, these islands pushed the boundaries of what it meant for me to consume art and what art is. I’ve always thought that nature itself is art. The Japanese have known this for a while – just take a look at the sacred worship they hold for the careful arrangement of a flower and its petals, the reverence for a strangely shaped rock and the flowering of a springtime tree.

And I pondered too on the fact that it might just be necessary to pluck people out of their usual routines, to make them travel to a small stranded island in the middle of the Japanese sea, to induce them into experiencing their senses in forgotten ways. What the surreal, bare cement structures of the museums do is to bring people to another planet and induce their minds into states of pure receptivity. In Teshima, as I watched entire families stare at a quivering dewdrop forming on the ground, I understood too the complexity and depth of such a simple act of nature. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, that same family will be driving home in Tokyo after their holiday, and as a thunderstorm forms and raindrops begin battering their car window, they will pause in traffic to watch the drops trickle down into each other and will be transported back to the museum, watching nature’s show unfurl before their eyes. Their every day life will become a piece of art, because, well, it already was.