Snow remakes a forest of seventy sculptures, and guests walk into it on snowshoes. The open-air museum at Sapporo Art Park sets some 70 modern works among the trees, where pieces by Dani Karavan and others stand in terrain and weather rather than in white rooms. Winter changes them most: the sculpture garden goes under deep snow, and visitors put on kanjiki, the traditional snowshoe, to see what has become of it.
It combines art, nature and play. The winter snowshoe program builds sculpture viewing, birdwatching and the hunt for animal tracks into a team photography challenge for up to about 50 guests, who compete in teams to find the best composition among the sculptures while catching what the wildlife has left behind. Looking becomes moving, and the activity runs on cooperation, observation and invention.
Only a Hokkaido winter yields this kind of team building. Instead of an indoor icebreaker, executives and their teams strap on snowshoes, walk into a sculpture forest and compete with cameras; the cold wakes everyone up, shared discovery pulls the team together, and people who never laugh at work will argue happily about how to frame one buried sculpture. A museum, a snowfield and a game stitched together is a Sapporo winter proposition, and it fixes the day in a team's memory with a place attached.