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Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes. There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says. It turned out there was a very good reason for this. Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital … Read more

The sound of Arctic wind howling through the strings of Sarah Smout’s carbon fibre cello on the pack ice connected to the North Pole is like nothing she has heard before. She joined a group of artists from all over the world on a trip to research and be inspired by the “breathtaking and absolutely … Read more

The island’s evolution into a globally renowned open-air museum and international contemporary arts hub was all but assured in 1994, when Yayoi Kusama’s yellow and black-spotted Pumpkin was added to the landscape’s growing collection of public artworks. This iconic work has since become emblematic of Naoshima itself. “[The] initial goal wasn’t to promote tourism,” said Soichiro Fukutake’s … Read more

Once polluted and suffering from depopulation, Naoshima has become Japan’s hottest contemporary art enclave – and there are signs that life there may be finally rebounding. Shinichi Kobayashi has idyllic memories of growing up on Naoshima, one of the nearly 3,000 islands scattered across Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. “We would go clam digging,” said the … Read more

Banksy’s famous mural of a masked man frozen forever in the instant before he unleashes not a brick or a bomb but a bouquet of flowers may seem, at first blush, to exemplify a pacifist’s commitment to peaceful disobedience. The work appears to echo the precepts of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha – a philosophy of non-violence … Read more

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