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  • [SOLD OUT] Hiroshi Sugimoto: On Photography and Japanese Art

[SOLD OUT] Hiroshi Sugimoto: On Photography and Japanese Art

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hiroshi sugimoto portrait

In rainbows: Hiroshi Sugimoto


Sugimoto Studios

Hiroshi Sugimoto, one of Japan's most important contemporary artists, will join Asia Society Museum Director Yasufumi Nakamori for a conversation exploring Sugimoto's photography, his current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, and the impact of historical Japanese arts, such as tea culture and calligraphy, on his current artistic practice.

Sugimoto will discuss his new work, Brush Impression, unpacking how the pandemic has influenced his signature artistic approach: calligraphic brushstrokes on photographic paper in a dark room setting.


On Brush Impression

brush impression sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto. 39.0884-M, Brush Impression, 2023
hiroshi sugimoto brush impression
Hiroshi Sugimoto. 39.0922-M Brush Impression, 2023

Sugimoto discusses the process and themes surrounding Brush Impression in his artist statement: 

When I finally returned to my New York studio after the three-year-long disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, I discovered that I was in possession of a large amount of photographic paper which had passed its expiry date. Rather like fresh food, this special paper for photographic printing deteriorates over time. The defining feature of my prints is the subtle expression of different shades, something that is very hard to achieve with photographic paper that is even slightly degraded. What I therefore did was to flip my thinking, Copernicus-style. My idea was not to accept deterioration as deterioration per se but to treat it as a form of beautification instead. When ancient works of art are exposed to the operations of time, deterioration usually causes an aesthetic improvement. The white of photographic paper looks rather like albumenized paper, while black tones acquire a certain softness on it. I decided to bring the calligraphy skills I had mastered during three years of enforced leisure into the dark room. In the dim room suffused with pale orange light, I spread out a sheet of photographic paper then dunk my brush into the developer. In the darkness, I gropingly draw the characters which I cannot actually see. Then, just for a fleeting moment, I expose the paper to a burst of light like a flash. Just the areas which are touched by the brush metamorphose into Japanese characters and float to the surface in black.

Having shown that it was possible to do calligraphy using a developer, I then tried dipping my brush in photographic fixer. I plied my bush surrounded by the stench of acid; this time it was white characters appearing on a jet-black ground. As I wrote, I tried to concentrate on the invisible characters, focusing my mind on the place where the meaning of the characters would manifest itself.

Protean and shapeshifting, fire is an extraordinary thing. Gaze at it and you will feel yourself being drawn into another world. This planet of ours was originally born from the fires of the sun. A blazing flame is at once a sacrament of birth and an echo of a burned-out death. Sometimes, as here, the burning flame flings out its arms and legs to be transcribed as the kanji character for fire.

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Speakers

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in 1948 in Tokyo, Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to the United States in 1970 and since then, has lived and worked in New York and Tokyo. A multi-disciplinary artist, Sugimoto’s practice expands to photography, sculpture, installation, architecture, garden design, writing, calligraphy, cooking, and producing/directing performing arts programs. His art bridges Eastern and Western ideologies while examining the nature of time, perception, and the origins of consciousness. His photographic series include Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Architecture, Portraits, Conceptual Forms, Lightning Fields, and Opticks among others. In 2008 he established the architecture firm New Material Research Laboratory and in 2009 he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization to promote traditional Japanese performing arts and culture. Sugimoto’s artworks have been exhibited around the world and are in numerous public collections including The Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York among others.

Sugimoto also established an agricultural foundation in 2011 to explore and maintain a symbiotic relationship between Nature and Human, adjacent to the Enoura Observatory and named it KANKITSUZAN. 

In 2019 Sugimoto took charge of the direction and scenography for At the Hawk’s Well, a one-act play by William Butler Yeats, which premiered at Palais Garnier, Paris, September 19 - October 15. He also did so for Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Teatro Español, Madrid, Teatro di Argentina in Rome, and Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York in 2018.

Sugimoto produced "SAMBASO, divine dance” - the official program of Japonismes 2018: les ames en resonance,  performed by Mansaku, Mansai, and Yuki Nomura. 
Théâtre de la Ville – Espace Cardin, Paris, September 19 – 22, 24-25.

Sugimoto is the recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001. He was awarded the 21st Premium Imperiale in 2009, Medal with Purple Ribbon by the Japanese government in 2010, and conferred the Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (The Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government in 2013, the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2014, and honored as a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government in 2017.

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Yasufumi Nakamori

Dr. Yasufumi Nakamori is the Vice President of Arts and Culture and Museum Director of Asia Society, New York. He was previously at the Tate, where he served as Senior Curator, International Art (Photography). He has advised on numerous programming and acquisition initiatives on Asian and Asian diaspora art and provided strategic management for photography and modern art at Tate Britain. He served on Tate’s inaugural Race Equality Task Force and the steering committee for the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.

Prior to Tate, Nakamori headed the Department of photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art from 2016 to 2018 (where he curated exhibitions of artists including Amar Kanwar, Leslie Hewitt, and Naoya Hatakeyama) and served as curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2008 to 2016. His catalogue Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture: Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro received a 2011 Alfred Barr Jr. Award from the College Art Association. He also taught graduate seminars focusing on the history of modern and contemporary Japanese art and architecture at Rice University and Hunter College, CUNY.

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Event Details

In-person
Thu 30 Nov 2023
6:30 - 8 p.m.

725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021

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