When Justin and I planned our day in Yufuin, Japan, we originally didn’t have Comico Art Museum as a place to visit. The plan was to take it easy and walk around Yufuin town for sightseeing and eating.
After seeing Google Maps and the high reviews for the museum, it piqued our interest.
It’s known for contemporary art, including an exhibit of Yayoi Kusama’s artwork. She is famous for her pumpkin and black dot sculptures and paintings.
We don’t know contemporary art, so we decided to visit and see what it is.
So, if you’re thinking about whether to visit the Comico Art Museum, we’ll share our experience from a non-art person’s point of view and what to expect when visiting. Overall, we enjoyed our time here.
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How to Buy Tickets & Cost
Option 1: Buy in person at the welcome / check-in counter.
The cost is:
- 1,700 yen for adults
- 1,200 yen for college students
- 1,000 yen for junior & senior high school (13-18 years old)
- 700 yen for elementary school students (6-12 years old)
- 1200 yen for disabled (need a disability certificate)
- Free for pre-school/children (under 5 years old)
Option 2: Buy online on the museum website and save money! You can save 200 yen per person.
What Did We Do?
When we arrived at the museum entrance, we originally planned to buy tickets at the counter.
But we decided to buy the tickets online to save money. Unfortunately, the museum doesn’t have free WiFi so we used data to connect to the Internet.
It took only a few minutes to complete the purchase with a credit card and the museum worker allowed us in.
Comico Art Museum entrance
What We Enjoyed About the Museum
The museum was just the right size.
It wasn’t too large or too small. The artwork was organized in 5 rooms in 2 separate buildings and an outdoor gallery. There was enough art to keep us occupied for an hour.
We tried to be artsy with the photography. This a view of Comico Art Museum from a window
It wasn’t crowded.
We went to the museum on a Friday and expected large crowds. But it was quiet for the mid-afternoon. The most that we saw was about 6 people in one gallery.
If you’re buying tickets online, you can choose your designed arrival time. The blocked timing helped with the crowds.
We received a pamphlet in English describing the artist and the artwork.
Since we weren’t familiar with the artists, the one-page pamphlet provided more information about the artists’ backgrounds and the artwork. We referred to it often since the galleries didn’t share general information.
Free audio guide available.
There is also a free audio guide available in different languages. You can scan the QR code located on the map and listen to the guide.
But you’ll need to have your own headphones as the museum doesn’t have any. We didn’t use the audio guide since we didn’t have headphones.
Yayoi Kusama’s Gallery
The most popular artwork is Yayoi Kusama who took two galleries. The galleries showed two different art styles.
The first room had the signature Pumpkin artwork with black dots. The dots appeared in her work from 1989 to 2003 from hallucinations she suffered during her youth.
We saw her yellow and red Pumpkin sculptures on Naoshima Island, so we were excited to see the paintings.
The second room had paintings of connected “nets.” It was a different spin to the black dots as the nets didn’t have a center. Many of the paints were solid colors with different color “nets.”
NOTE: Photos are not allowed in the two Yayoi Kusama galleries.
Takashi Murakami’s Gallery
Justin has a Uniqlo shirt of the smiling flower with Doremon, a blue and white robotic cat from the future. We didn’t know who the artist of the smiling flower was and found out that Takashi Murakami is the creator.
It was incredible seeing 3 walls of bright and colorful flowers. The paintings brighten up the day. As we looked closer at the paintings, we noticed a few flowers that weren’t smiling.
Artwork created by Takashi Murakami
According to the pamphlet, the smiling flowers have both “a positive image but also a sense of emptiness and intimidation.” It’s a different perspective of the smiling flower since people can have a facade behind the smiles.
Do you see the sleepy face?
The Other Noteworthy Artwork
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Seascapes” was a unique perspective of photographing lakes around the world and showing two different colors at sunrise or sunset – mostly black and white.
Originally we didn’t know that these were photographs since they looked like different color paints. However, after reading the pamphlet, we appreciated Sugimoto’s dedication and patience in capturing the photos.
Tatsuo Miyajima’s “Time Waterfall” was a digital artwork of a vertical marque with falling numbers at different speeds. According to the pamphlet, “…Lives of people living in the present are constantly flowing, and sometimes overlapping with other people’s lives.”
Time Waterfall created by Tatsuo Miyajima
Outdoor sculptures
There are three outdoor sculptures on the second level of the building.
We loved Yoshitomo Nara’s “Your Dog” sculpture. The white dog is prominently displayed with Mount Yufu in the background. It was a beautiful day to take a photo with the white dog.
I loved the size of the “Your Dog” sculpture, created by Yoshitomo Nara
Two other sculptures were Kohei Nawa’s Ether (lava) and Mariko Mori’s Eternal (space theme). We didn’t know what these two artworks were so we referred to the pamphlet.
Eternal by Mariko Mori
A small library
Before entering the outdoor sculpture area, there was a small library with books on the artists and general contemporary art. It was a nice and quiet area to sit down and relax with a book.
We browsed through a book of Yayoi Kusama’s artwork and saw how her art has changed over the years.
An Opportunity for Improvement
No free WiFi in the museum.
This is a small thing to note but it would have been great to have WiFi access.
We mentioned earlier how the museum offered free audio guides, but data usage is required to access them.
We didn’t have a Japan SIM Card or pocket WiFi device as we use Google Project Fi for our international phone plan (from the U.S.). But we wanted to save our data for emergencies.
**If you’re interested in trying Project Fi, you can try it for free! Click here for the details.
Final Thoughts
We thought the Comico Art Museum was worth the 1-hour visit to see artists’ creativity and to see what contemporary art is like. We loved Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami’s galleries and would highly recommend them.
The pricing is fair to support the museum. We suggest buying tickets online to save 200 yen per person.
If you have extra time on your Yufuin trip and love art, then add a visit to this museum!
Check out our other posts about Yufuin:
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