BnA Alter Museum

Photography by Tomooki Kengaku

Projects:

November 19, 2019

BnA Alter Museum

The stimulating D/R/M room from Boredoms in BnA Alter Museum in Kyoto analyzes the sound experience

Keigo Fukugaki, Yuto Maeda, Yu Tazawa, and Kenji Daikoku, who joined the team later, wanted to redefine the tenets of hospitality with an all-out dedication and commitment to the artists involved. To do so, they conceived hotel-cum-art gallery BnA (meaning Bed and Art) in 2015 with a single room in an Airbnb in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood that was covered in work by Japanese artists JonJon Green and Hideyuki Katsumata. “We envisioned using hospitality as a way to create a new economic model mutually beneficial to the artist and the traveler around installation and space art,” says Tazawa. In fact, artists get a cut of the profits every time their room is booked. Their first hotel BnA Koenji, also in the capital, opened in 2016 with two art rooms, and in May, it was joined by the brand’s second boutique art hotel, BnA Alter Museum in Kyoto, their most ambitious project yet. Fifteen Japanese artists under the direction of nine art directors created 31 permanent art rooms that push boundaries and defy expectations. Consider the gilded Goen No Ma room from Ryuichi Ohira, who explores fate and faith through his interpretation of a shrine, or D/R/M from experimental music band Boredoms that analyzes sound by recreating the human ear through a surreal sensory-driven experience (it comes with a lot of warnings, says Tazawa). As the creative collective expands—another hotel is set to open in Tokyo in 2020—they continue to put art first. “You get somebody’s attention for more than 10 hours and immerse them in our world,” he says. “At the age of information overflow, this is unheard of. It’s a way to create an intimate relationship between an artist and an audience.”