Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Whenever I stand on a cliff looking at the sea, I envision an infinite beyond. The horizon lies within bounds and the imagination stretches to infinity.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto

The esteemed contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent much of his creative practice questioning and reflecting on the transience of time, human existence and consciousness, the importance of art, invention, and the nature of infinity. Known principally for his sustained photographic explorations that have engaged him for over fifty years, his broad creative practice also encompasses sculpture, architecture, landscape design, interior environments, and major artworks in the public domain.

Sugimoto brings an inherently curious and enquiring mind to each of his projects; he is constantly questioning perception and analysing relationships. His approach is open and playful at times, revelatory and nimble, traversing disciplines from art, science, and religion to philosophy. His overarching lifelong concerns encompass Eastern and Western thought, history, science with knowledge of empiricism and metaphysics.

Australian audiences will be familiar with Sugimoto’s work from international museum and gallery exhibitions, yet the breadth and complexity of his practice has had relatively little exposure here, until this year. He participated in the 10th Biennale of Sydney: Jurassic Technologies Revenant in 1996 and the third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1999 at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. Rachel Kent included Sugimoto’s seascapes in her memorable exhibition Liquid Sea at the Museum of Contemporary of Art, Sydney, in 2003. Curator David Elliot invited Sugimoto to participate in the 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age in 2010 with a site-specific installation in the decommissioned power station on Cockatoo Island. Visitors stepped into a glowing space of large-scale light boxes displaying photographs from the artist’s Lightning Field series accompanied by an intermittent static buzz. At the top of a stepped scaffold, they encountered a thirteenth century Japanese figure, a statue of Rajin, the god of thunder. Titled Faraday cage, 2010, the evanescent atmosphere felt charged and a little dangerous. The large-format images of forked lightning conveyed energy and a dramatic sense of the dawn of life. That year Sugimoto also delivered the keynote lecture titled The Origins of Art.

This winter, people in Australia have an opportunity to experience Sugimoto’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is organised in association with the Hayward Gallery, London, where it was presented from October 2023. Time Machine then travelled to Beijing’s UCCA Center of Contemporary Art, and on to MCA Sydney. Curated by the Hayward’s director Ralph Rugoff, in collaboration with curatorial teams at each venue, the exhibition comprises key works from all the artist’s major photographic series, enabling audiences to explore an output that the curators describe as “some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time—pictures that are meticulously nuanced and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous.”

For Sugimoto, photography is an ancient and inherent form of seeing; a means to analyse relationships. Through his sustained series of artworks, he questions and articulates the nature of the world.

The artist cites a long-held memory of the sea as an early influence. Looking from a window as the train he was on emerged from a tunnel, the child glimpsed “the sprawling expanse of the Sagami Bay on a clear and cloudless morning, the sun glistening on the horizon like a Japanese sword.” This vision has informed his lifetime pursuit of photographing bodies of water in Seascapes, one of his best-known series where the horizon line dissects the sky and the sea equally—the atmosphere at each location determines mesmerising variations of light and dark.

Sugimoto’s first seascape was taken of the Caribbean Sea from Jamaica in 1980. Since then, he has photographed more than two hundred others, from Bass Strait and the Bay of Sagami to the Ligurian Sea and the English Channel. The visual power of the series resides in the pared-back, light-infused expanses bearing no trace of human existence. While the rigour of a fixed format is typical of 1980s conceptual and minimalist aesthetic, over the decades Sugimoto’s Seascapes have become timeless for their evocation of infinity and the sublime.

Sugimoto was born in 1948 in Tokyo. His interest in photography began as a high school student—he was a fan of Audrey Hepburn and took his camera to the cinema to capture her image from a film as it played. He majored in economics at Rikkyo University, Tokyo, where as a student he read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and was influenced by communist ideology. After graduating, he set off backpacking, travelling west to experience the impact of communism in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. He continued on to Vienna to explore Western European culture. In 1971, in his early twenties, he visited Los Angeles and decided to stay, enrolling in LA ArtCenter College of Design. A move to New York in 1974 immersed the young artist in the lively art scene, where he encountered Japanese artists On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Isamu Noguchi, and Yoko Ono. He decided to settle and take up photography in earnest.

It was here that he first visited the American Museum of Natural History and discovered how, through the flattening effect of the camera lens, the lifelike qualities of the animals in natural history displays could be augmented. He was intrigued with the paradox of using photography to render artificial nature more realistic and convincing to the human eye. In photographing these natural history tableaux in black and white, Sugimoto discovered a way to see the world as the camera does. Of this the artist states on his website, “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

Sugimoto’s Dioramas, 1976–, represent his first project as an artist. The conceptual premise was straight forward, but the outcome was nuanced and sophisticated. When the Dioramas were first exhibited, these images of animals seemingly in their natural habitat were occasionally interpreted as genuine wildlife photography. The Dioramas introduced a troubling sense of doubting what is before us, questioning the photographic image. They went further in that they reintroduced life into subjects that were long dead.

Other series conceived around this time included Theaters, 1976–, and Drive-In Theaters, 1993, and later investigations of sites of drama and performance, Opera House, 2014–, Abandoned Theater, 2015–, feature images of human construction but are uncannily devoid of human presence or the casual clutter of daily life. The radiant white screens shown in these empty spaces are made through a single long exposure of the entire length of a movie, that Sugimoto has described as “a condensed model of time.”

Sugimoto’s sweeping oeuvre readily considers time past and future. In their disquieting stillness and frozen beauty, his photographs portray artifice, abandoned, or forsaken states, notions of infinity and eternity, or haunting otherness. In the forty-eight darkly glimmering images of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in the Sea of Buddha, 1995, the artist interrogates systems of belief and their expression across the centuries and the power of art, particularly in the present time, to endure. He believes humanity is at a critical point in our evolutionary journey and he is genuinely concerned that in these times, art has lost its way, its purpose, and what it should express.

Sugimoto believes a “return to the wellspring of human consciousness, (to) explore its sources, and chart the course it has followed thus far,” will go some way in providing direction for the future. In 2009 he established the Odawara Art Foundation and the Enoura Observatory, which opened in 2017. It includes a multidisciplinary arts compound, a Noh theatre, an optical glass stage, a gallery, teahouse, and gardens. Facing east over the Bay of Sagami, it is located on the exact site where, as a child, Sugimoto first witnessed the expansive sea and sky from the train.

This article was originally published in issue 68 

EXHIBITION 
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine
2 August – 27 October 2024
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney