About

Where Temples Meet Art

Spring & Autumn Exhibition in Collaboration with Temples & Shrines. We present temple's treasures, artworks, traditional crafts and illumination.

We also introduce recommended shops around the venues. We hope you enjoy Japanese traditional architectures and cultural properties in Kyoto.

Marugoto Museum Executive Committee

Most of our members were born and raised in Kyoto and run their businesses here. We feel a real sense of crisis that the area is losing what makes it itself: machiya townhouses turned into garages, young people drifting away from Buddhism, temples in decline in an aging society, shrines whose festivals have disappeared, fewer connections between residents, shopping streets with more and more shutters closed, streets with fewer people walking, and a local economy in decline.

And yet this town — loved by great figures of history, connected with many writers and artists, where tea culture and the culture of the townspeople flourished, and home to historic cultural properties — still carries traces of all of this today.

The mission of this project is to look once more at traditional crafts such as Nishijin-ori weaving, at the history behind Kyoto's formation as a religious city, at the traditions, functions and cultural properties of its temples and shrines, and at the people active in local shops and places today — everything that can be called a local resource — and, through the power of art, to make visible a different perspective and the appeal that emerges when we look deeper.

As coordinators, we connect artists with head priests and with the people and places of local traditional industries, producing each exhibition so that the power of the place and the power of the artist are brought out to the fullest.

Our Mission

• Contributing to the community

  Contribute to local revitalization through tradition, culture and art. By holding an exhibition that invites visitors to walk around the town — something a single venue cannot do — we create opportunities to encounter local resources, encourage visits to the shops around the venues, and enliven the local economy.

• Preserving cultural properties

  Maintain the traditional architecture and artworks of temples and shrines as local resources and pass them on to future generations. Admission fees go toward the preservation of these cultural properties.

• Discovering talent

  Contribute to the cultural development of Nishijin and Kamigyo-ku by giving promising craftspeople and artists a place to show their work.

• Creating opportunities

  Create casual opportunities for visitors and local residents to encounter cultural properties — buildings, crafts and temple collections — and art, cultivating the ground for a richer cultural life.

• Attracting new bearers of the culture

  Remain an organization of active individuals and groups building an attractive community, so that more businesses make appealing use of local resources and more people settle here and take part in local activities.

Organizers