Hiroshi Sugimoto, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, detail, 1998, Gelatin-silver print, 47 x 58", Edition of 5, Courtesy the Artist.

de Young Museum
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara
Tea Garden Drive
415-863-3330
San Francisco
Herbst Exhibition Galleries
Hiroshi Sugimoto
July 7-
September 23, 2007

The extraordinary 30-year career of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948, Japan) is celebrated in this retrospective of 120 luminous photographs, made from 1976 to the present. This presentation constitutes the first major survey of Sugimoto’s oeuvre and includes such iconic works as Chrysler Building, 1997, and Ligurian Sea, Frumura, 1993.

One of Japan’s most important contemporary artists, Sugimoto is known for his ongoing, multiple series of hauntingly beautiful black-and-white photographs, which explore the themes of time, memory, dreams, and natural histories. Working with a large-format camera, his glowing images range from the starkly minimal to the richly detailed, and are often suffused with expanses of light and space.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. It is curated by Kerry Brougher, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum, and David Elliot, former Director of the Mori Art Museum. The four-venue international tour, which began at the Mori Art Museum, also included The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where the exhibition was on view prior to the showing in San Francisco. The exhibition includes examples of the series that Sugimoto began in the mid-1970s, Dioramas and Movie Theaters, which are views of natural history displays and the screens and architecture of cinemas, as well as images from Seascapes and Portraits, started in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

The seven photographs in Portraits include images that were taken in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London of wax models of Henry VIII and his six wives. Sugimoto painstakingly “remade” them to look like the original paintings from which they were modeled by isolating them from their surroundings in the wax gallery and employing lighting techniques similar to those that the painters might have used. Another photograph, The Music Lesson (1999) further elaborates on the connection between painting and photography. It depicts a wax re-creation of Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), 1662–1664, which was thought to have been created with the aid of a camera obscura.

Nine works from Sugimoto’s more recent Architecture series are also featured. These blurred, almost dream-like images conjure the moment when an architect’s inspiration begins to coalesce into a vision. In a special tribute to the architects of the new de Young Museum, Sugimoto has included for the San Francisco showing Signal Box–Herzog & de Meuron (1998), a photograph of the copper-clad building in Basel, Switzerland that was a model for the de Young.

The show also presents Sea of Buddha, 1995, which is comprised of 48 photographs of 1001 Buddhist sculptures, taken in the 12th-century Sanjusangen-do temple in Kyoto. These images were made under conditions that recreated the splendor of the original Heian period installation, but the serial repetition of the sculptures reminded Sugimoto of certain qualities of 20th-century art, and his photographs link them to aesthetic techniques of 1970s minimalism. Like Sea of Buddha, the series Conceptual Forms, which was begun in 2004, encapsulates the artist’s interest in tangible models as points of entry into spiritual theoretical concepts. The eight photographs in the Conceptual Forms series, Mechanical Forms, 2004 and the three-dimensional piece La Boile en Valise (The Wooden Box), 2004, also pay homage to the influence of Marcel Duchamp on Sugimoto. “Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions,” he has said of these works.

Working for the most part with black-and-white film, Sugimoto has created images of exceptional formal beauty and surface quality that stimulate both intellect and vision and are sometimes imbued with a mysterious and somewhat unsettling ambiguity. These signal images often capture what is elusive to sight—the horizon line between the sky and sea at night, the sum total of light projected during a feature-length film, or the physical contours of the principle represented by a mathematical equation. His work also addresses the human impulse to represent reality, a drive that has inspired artists throughout history and is embodied by the genesis of photography itself.

Exhibition Installation at de Young Specially Designed by Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto has designed each of the four museum installations in the tour of his retrospective. His experiences working with the architectural challenges of curved walls at the signature Bunshaft-designed Hirshhorn Museum inspired his decision to create a curved wall for the installation of ten Seacapes photographs at the de Young Museum. They will be shown in a dramatic space lit by special frame projectors that create window-like vistas onto a seemingly endless sea.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto left Japan in 1970 after graduating from Rikkyo University with a degree in economics. He traveled throughout the Soviet Union and Europe and then moved to Los Angeles, where he studied photography at Art Center College of Design. He moved to New York in 1974 and currently divides his time between New York and Tokyo. Sugimoto's work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows. He was the recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001 and the Mainichi Art Prize in 1988.

Sugimoto Exhibitions also on View at Asian Art Museum in Fall, 2007
In October, two additional exhibitions that showcase the work of Mr. Sugimoto will be on view at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History, juxtaposes the artist's exquisitely minimalist works with his own collection of fossils, artworks and religious artifacts ranging from the prehistoric to the 15th century. The result is an extended exploration of time, life and spirituality.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha, detail, 1995, private collection, Courtesy of the artist.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aegean Sea, Pilion, from the series Seascapes, 1990, Gelatin silver print. 60 x 72 x 3", Image courtesy of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Asian Art Museum
200 Larkin Street
415-581-3500
San Francisco
Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History
October 12, 2007-January 6, 2008

The Asian Art Museum presents Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History, an investigation into the experience of time and history from the perspective of internationally acclaimed artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Conceived and curated by Sugimoto, the exhibition is co-organized by the Japan Society and the Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. In conjunction with History of History, the Asian Art Museum will also present Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Institute, featuring more than 20 original works of Japanese fashion by five leading designers, as well as new photographs by Sugimoto. The Asian Art museum will be the sole venue for Stylized Sculpture, and the final stop of an international tour for History of History.

Comprised of over 80 works, History of History juxtaposes Sugimoto’s own photographs, selected from the artist’s well known series of seascapes, natural history dioramas and wax museum figures, with an enormous range of traditional Japanese and East Asian artworks, as well as prehistoric, ancient, and medieval religious and ritual artifacts, all drawn from Sugimoto’s private collection. The exhibition’s juxtapositions of past and present add a new dimension to Sugimoto’s photography, which the artist has famously described as “time exposed.” Employing tools and techniques that recall 19th century photography — an 8 x 10 view camera designed expressly for the artist, low-sensitivity film, hand-printed, black and white images — Sugimoto’s photographs suggest the uncanny persistence of the eternal in the present with their powerful sense of calm and strange, fragile stillness. In History of History, Sugimoto’s preoccupation with the passage of time takes on concrete, multiple forms, as he places photographs from his various series in the context of the history of Japanese art and civilization — more precisely, in proximity with the aesthetic, sacred and geological objects that he has collected over the past decades.

Beginning with prehistoric fossils of plant, animal life and geological formations, the exhibition offers a tour of history that includes ritual objects from Japan’s Jomon and Kofun periods (6th century B.C. to 7th century A.D.); religious reliquaries, textiles, mandalas and other Buddhist paintings, sutras, and sculpture from the 8th through the 15th century; and, a number of recent assemblages in which the artist has combined ancient works or fragments with his own photographs and other contemporary objects. The exhibition embraces an immense span of time, materials, and representational processes, from fossilized accretions to mechanical reproductions; ritual objects and sculptures hewn from recalcitrant stone or cast in bronze, to silver-gelatin apparitions on paper. The resulting presentation is a precisely staged, richly evocative construction of history: not history as a remote past or as a set of static objects, but as a process that unfolds through attentive experience, a continual discovery of the past in the present and the present in the past.

The History of History presentation at the Asian Art Museum is the only installment to include a series of nine hanging scrolls with fragments of a renowned 8th century manuscript of the Flower Ornament Sutra, rarely on view outside of Japan. Known as the Nigatsudo Yake-kyo, this sutra was miraculously recovered from the ashes of a 1667 fire that destroyed the Nigatsudo Hall at the great temple of Todai-ji.in Nara, Japan. Remarkably, the wavy burned edges as well as the unusual brilliance of the silver characters have given these surviving manuscripts—the only existing sutra in silver on blue indigo-dyed paper—a unique and haunting allure.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto graduated from St. Paul’s University, Tokyo, in 1970 and left Japan for the United States to study at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, earning a B.F.A. in 1972. There he absorbed the tenets of Conceptualism and Minimalism, which continue to inform the technical and intellectual rigor of his work. In 1974 he moved to New York City and became a dealer and collector of Japanese and East Asian Art in 1979.

Sugimoto’s frank veneration of classical Japanese concepts of beauty and his deep respect for traditional arts and religious practices would seem to set him apart from dominant trends in contemporary art and photography. Yet like many contemporary photographers, Sugimoto views history as a dynamic process and productive “problem” for photography, not as a given that photography simply records, captures or reflects.

Working in series, Sugimoto is deeply interested in the interconnections between modern and ancient worlds and the ways in which time, an abstraction, is perceived and represented. Following an early series of time-lapse photographs of old movie theater interiors, he began to photograph museum exhibits, and created a series of impeccably detailed wax human figures and dioramas of early humans from museums of natural history. Devoid of any details such as exhibition furniture or gallery space to indicate the fabricated character of these beings and environments, the photographs seem eerily real and unreal at the same time.

Since 1980 Sugimoto has traveled throughout the world to photograph seascapes devoid of human incident. Boldly minimalist at first glance, these exquisitely precise, nearly symmetrical images invite close scrutiny, revealing subtle difference in tonality, horizon line, and atmospheric conditions, despite their initial appearance of sameness or emptiness. Notions of timelessness and the fragility of the natural environment seem to interact as the viewer reflects on these hazy projections of an apparently infinite space. Sugimoto has discussed these works in terms of a distant human past that endures in the process of contemplation, “I thought about our ancestors who first saw the sea and gave it a name … Without language, the separation between the inner and outer world needs not be so apparent. In the Seascapes I was thinking about the earliest experiences of mankind, about the time when the first people named the world around them, and named the sea.”

Other themes explored in Sugimoto’s serial work include modern architecture and modern mechanical structures.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Testament of a Penis (side view), 2003, Stone rod, Jomon Period, 100th–4th centuries BC, Hospital gurney (1950s), Granite, chrome-plated piping, aluminum, rubber. 22 x 84 x 15.4", Image courtesy of Hiroshi Sugimoto.