The empty shops are the venue. In Beppu, exhibitions and residencies take place in the lanes of the hot spring quarter and in premises that are no longer trading, with a period in autumn when they concentrate into something like a season. The rooms are not white cubes built for art; they are upstairs floors with the tatami still down, or shopfronts whose signage came off years ago and was never replaced by anything. Visitors walk in without composing themselves first, which changes what the work has to do and how it can behave. You go along a street that smells faintly of sulphur, step into one door, and then continue walking to the next thing without any sense of having completed a visit. The order is inverted from the usual: you are walking the town and encountering work, rather than travelling somewhere in order to see it.

You will spend more time reading a map than standing in front of anything, and that is not a complaint. Ōita is twenty minutes away by car, and the local employers are largely the university and the accommodation trade. The vacant premises are the precondition for all of this, not evidence that something has been repaired, and it would be dishonest to describe them otherwise.

Having more space than you need is a weakness and it is also a material, depending entirely on what you decide to do with it. Beppu produces more hot spring water than anywhere else in the country and has done for a century, which shaped the town into something built for visitors. When the visitors thinned, the buildings stayed. The art programme is one answer to that arithmetic and does not claim to be the only one. Beppu has chosen to treat it as the second, and that choice is legible from the street.