Coordinates: 51°28′43″N 0°0′28″W / 51.47861°N 0.00778°W / 51.47861; -0.00778

The Fan Museum was the first museum dedicated to the fan. It is located in the Greenwich World Heritage Site in South East London, England.

The Museum, which opened in 1991, is accommodated in two grade II* listed houses built in 1721. An orangery decorated with murals has been added to the building. There is also a Japanese-style garden with a fan-shaped parterre, a pond, and a stream.

The Fan Museum owns over 4,000 fans, fan leaves and related ephemera. The oldest fan in the collection dates from the 10th century and the collection of 18th and 19th century European fans is especially impressive. The entire collection is not displayed permanently due to conservation concerns, so three times a year the selection of fans on exhibit is changed. There is also a permanent educational display about fans, teaching about their history, the manufacturing process, and the different kinds of fans.

The Museum operates a conservation unit where work is done both for other museums and for the public. New fans are also made at the Museum, and fan-making classes are held. The Fan Museum also has a reference library.

Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 草間 弥生, Kusama Yayoi^?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper middle class family of seedling merchants, Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention after she organised a series of Body Festivals in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.

Tadao Ando (安藤 忠雄, Andō Tadao^?, born September 13, 1941, in Minato-ku, Osaka, Japan and raised in Asahi-ku in the city) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was categorized by Francesco Dal Co as critical regionalism. Ando has led a storied life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field. He visited buildings designed by renowned architects like Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn before returning to Osaka in 1968 and established his own design studio, Tadao Ando Architect and Associates.

He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned^{[by whom?]} for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative through the pared aesthetics of international modernism.^{[citation needed]}