The chimney was there before the museum was. The Seirensho Art Museum on Inujima occupies the remains of a copper refinery built in 1909, and it uses what was already standing: the chimney, and the karami bricks slagged out of the refining process itself. Hiroshi Sambuichi designed the building and Yukinori Yanagi made the work inside it, so conserving the ruin and exhibiting art were handled as one problem rather than two.

There are also works installed in houses in the village, so seeing the island means walking it, one building at a time. The boat from Hōden port takes about ten minutes. The population is in the tens, and shopping and medical care are on the mainland side, which is the ordinary condition of small islands in the Inland Sea. The museum opens from nine until half past four, closes from Tuesday to Thursday, and shuts entirely from the beginning of December to the end of February.

The refinery did not operate for long. That the brickwork and the chimney of such a short-lived plant were still standing a century later has a dull explanation: shipping the material off an island costs more than leaving it where it is, so neglect did the work that preservation is usually credited with. Nobody protected this. Nobody could be bothered to remove it either, which turns out to be the more durable of the two arrangements, and a great deal cheaper. Finding a use for what survived came decades afterwards, at which point the ruin had acquired the one quality no new building can be given, which is having been there a long time.