Sapporo Art Park

This guide to Sapporo Art Park starts with quarrymen cutting pale volcanic Sapporo nanseki stone from this hillside as early as eighteen seventy-two, stone that once held up the young city's warehouses and chimneys until concrete made it obsolete. You'll hear how the abandoned pit sat scarred and overgrown for decades, until a group of Hokkaido sculptors calling themselves CINQ looked at it in the early nineteen eighties and saw a shape to build around rather than a wound to fill in. Look for the old chisel marks still visible in the cut stone underfoot and along the retaining walls as you walk the paths among the sculptures.