Along a narrow residential street in Kanawa, the historic heart of Beppu City known for their geothermal hot springs, is an inconspicuous 2-story home that, until recently, would have been barely noticeable. With gaping holes carved into it, the home was recently revealed as art collective Mé’s newest installation.
Art collective 目[mé], founded in Tokyo in 2013, is known for their surreal and whimsical installations that question the way we perceive the world around us, unsettling assumptions, expectations, and pre-conceptions. They’ve previously floated a hot air balloon of a giant head over Tokyo and created a wave-like sculpture inside a room of a museum.
Their latest installation, revealed in December 2025, is a home with two gigantic holes carved into the sides as if an ogre was crafting with an exacto knife. Peering into the holes, one immediately notices that, instead of walls and furniture, the interior has been transformed into a cavernous underworld. Titled “space II” the installation is the 2nd in a series altering everyday homes in Japan. The first was in 2020 when the collective inserted a white cubic gallery space into the 2nd floor of a home in northern Japan.
Kanawa, the site of the collective’s latest installation, is home to geothermal activity so extreme that it has hotsprings with names like “blood pond hell” (血の池地獄) and “Beppu Hell” (別府地獄). What did this place look like in the past, when it was still forming? How did this land go from being called hell, to being reinterpreted as a place of healing? It was this incongruity that informed the installation, which visitors will be able to enter. The official website will begin taking reservations in January 2026. Here is the exact location.
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