Here is an article that appeared in the Washington Post last fall about the
Miho.
He had another article in the ArtNewspaper on this museum, but I don't have
that online.

A Temple for Antiquities

 In the Japanese Countryside, Religious Sect
 Opens a Lavish I.M. Pei-Designed Museum

 By Jason Kaufman
 Special to The Washington Post
 Sunday, November 30, 1997; Page G05
 The Washington Post

 KYOTO, Japan



?The phrase "Japanese religious cult" has
 taken on a sinister edge since a doomsday sect filled Tokyo
 subways with deadly nerve gas two years ago. But religious
 fervor in Japan has other outlets besides do-it-yourself
 apocalypse. The Shinji Shumeikai spiritual organization offers a
 case in point. In the last seven years it has poured hundreds of
 millions of dollars into an extraordinary collection of ancient
 artworks and built a state-of-the-art museum to showcase
 them.

 Designed by I.M. Pei (whose credits include the East Wing of
 our National Gallery of Art and the Grand Louvre in Paris), the
 Miho Museum lies about 20 miles southeast of Kyoto in a
 nature preserve. The opening last month was a lavish affair
 attended by museum directors, dealers and collectors from
 around the world.

 Yet many aspects of the project remain shrouded in mystery.

 Who are these people? Where do they get their money? And
 why have the Shumei collected this material and opened a
 museum?

 The Shumei, as the group's members are known, will not
 disclose their acquisitions budget, but insiders describe them as
 a leading force in the antiquities market. The Miho Museum's
 specialization in Western antiquities is unique in Japan, where
 the market for such objects is in its infancy.

 The museum alone reportedly cost a quarter of a billion dollars.

 The building is about an hour's drive from Kyoto, in the
 wooded mountains of Shigaraki. Uniformed security guards
 salute as vehicles pass the gate, and smiling sect members
 wave as visitors near the reception pavilion. A paved path
 leads into a steel-lined tunnel that slices into the side of a
 mountain and emerges a few hundred yards later on a 400-foot
 bridge supported by cables attached to the tunnel's mouth. The
 span conducts visitors across a ravine to the main entrance of
 the museum, a pavilion in which Pei has recast the traditional
 steep-roofed religious architecture of Japan in his own
 characteristic high-modernist geometric idiom.

 As with Pei's National Gallery wing, the exhibition areas are
 less effectively conceived than the expansive, sunlit public
 spaces. Seemingly random in plan and largely devoid of natural
 light, they are like afterthoughts appended to the airy atrium
 and nearby tea room.

The inaugural installation contains about 260 of the more than
1,000 antiquities currently held by the Shumei, with one wing
devoted to Japanese objects and the other to items from
ancient China, Korea, India, Central Asia, Egypt, Greece,
Rome and the Middle East. The great strengths are Chinese,
Iranian and Egyptian art -- world-class objects assembled in a
mere seven years, mainly through Noriyoshi Horiuchi, an
antiquities dealer based in Tokyo and Basel, Switzerland, who
has become a trusted friend and, since 1991, the primary
consultant to the Miho Museum.

The star piece is a 3,000-year-old solid silver statuette of the
falcon-headed deity Horus, with eyes of rock crystal, hair inlaid
with lapis and skin with traces of gold leaf. The 16-inch-tall
seated figure is the only known Egyptian cult figure extant.
Equally magnificent is a monumental black stone statue of the
Ptolemaic Queen Arsinoe II, and an astonishingly
well-preserved life-size wood figure from a 20th-century B.C.
Egyptian tomb.

From Mesopotamia is a 9th-century B.C. gypsum relief that
was doing service as a dart board at an English boarding
school until it was sold at Christie's in London for some $12
million. Even more rare are gold beakers from northwestern
Iran whose surfaces are covered with hammered and engraved
depictions of vultures and bulls with elaborately sculpted heads
projecting from the cups' walls.

Among the Chinese treasures are a variety of inlaid bronze
vessels and ornaments, a spritely bronze horse from an Eastern
Han dynasty tomb, fine ceramics and scroll paintings. A
2nd-century Gandharan standing Buddha in gray schist is one
of the largest in the world. The Japanese wing houses a superb
range of tea ceremony objects, an assortment of fine paintings
and calligraphies, decorative arts and sculptures like a
Kamakura painted wooden Jizo-bosatsu, a Buddhist deity.

Despite having hired a New York publicity firm whose client
list includes Spain's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and
California's Getty Museum, the sect is less than forthcoming in
answering questions about the collection. But religious scholars
and former members provide some insight about the secretive
group's beliefs and activities.

Shinji Shumeikai (which means "divine guidance supreme light
organization") was founded in 1970 by Mihoko Koyama, a
disciple of the Japanese religious philosopher Mokichi Okada
(1882-1955), whose teachings are central to the sect.
Membership today numbers in the tens of thousands, mainly in
Asia but with outposts in California and Europe as well. Okada
held that a divine spiritual purification would soon occur
through a global catastrophe unless humanity could rid itself of
sickness, poverty and discord by means of prayer, natural
agriculture and appreciation of beauty. It is this latter belief in
the salutary spiritual effects of aesthetic experience that led to
the creation of the Miho Museum.

In collecting art and establishing her museum, Koyama follows
a precedent set by Okada, whose invention of an imitation
diamond made him rich in the late 1910s and allowed him to
study art, which led in 1952 to his founding the Hakone
Museum of Art in Atami for Japanese and Western artworks
from his collection.

The museum is not the first major architectural commission by
the sect. Shumei headquarters, about a kilometer away from
the Miho Museum, features a man-made cascade of "miracle
water," a carillon bell tower designed by Pei in 1987 (his first
building in Japan), and the sect's great hip-roofed assembly hall
designed in 1983 by Minoru Yamasaki, best known for the
World Trade Center's twin towers in lower Manhattan.

This immense skylit sanctuary has seating for nearly 6,000
before an altar containing a wooden statue of Okada, to whom
all prayers are addressed.

     © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company




"MARI+TAKAMATSU" <[log in to unmask]> on 06/24/98 12:04:09 PM

Please respond to Museum discussion list <[log in to unmask]>

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cc:    (bcc: Louise Kennedy/FS/KSG)
Subject:  Re: NEW I.M. PEI MUSEUM IN JAPAN?






Yes, I've been there!
It must be the Miho Museum by I.M. PEI, which locates in Shiga prefecture
near Kyoto.
This museum opened last autum and is a elaborated museum as Japanese one.
You can check infomations at
http://www.miho.or.jp/


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