Water rises out of the floor and moves all day. The Teshima Art Museum stands on a hillside at Karato: a concrete shell with no columns in it, roughly forty by sixty metres, and 4.3 metres at its highest point. It was completed in 2010 to a design by Ryue Nishizawa, and the work inside, Rei Naito's Matrix, consists of water emerging from the floor and finding its way across it, changing shape continuously through the course of a day.

Opening hours run from ten to five between March and September, and from ten to four from October to February. The building looks down over terraced rice fields, and there are further works distributed among the villages, so seeing Teshima means walking the island rather than visiting a site on it. Boats come from Uno and from Takamatsu, and the timetable rather than the opening hours is what usually decides how long a visit lasts. The population is in the eight hundreds and there are few places to eat, so meals are something to settle in advance rather than to improvise.

With no columns, the surface of the ceiling is the shape of the space, and nothing interrupts it. Light, wind and sound come in through the openings and reach the floor undeflected, which means the weather outside effectively determines what the interior is like — two visits on the same day are not the same visit. People describe the visit as going to watch the water move, and that is what it looks like from outside. It would be nearer the truth to say you go to watch the weather, with the water serving as the instrument that makes an hour of it visible on a floor.