feature / alumni / exhibitions / photography-and-imaging / diversity
October 29, 2024
By Solvej Schou
Photos by Juan Posada

Hiroshi Sugimoto inspires at ArtCenter with micro-exhibition and intimate conversation

The alum, recipient of ArtCenter’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award, was in conversation on campus, timed to an ArtCenter micro-exhibition of his legendary work

“It’s preexisting—the beauty. It's just hiding somewhere. I have to discover it, rather than create it,” said renowned Tokyo– and New York–based alum Hiroshi Sugimoto (BS 74 Photography and Imaging) recently during a talk at ArtCenter.

Recipient of ArtCenter’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award, Sugimoto is an artist, photographer and architect whose works have been exhibited around the world, from the Guggenheim to the Smithsonian to the Museum of Contempory Art, Tokyo. During the intimate event “In Focus: Legendary Artist and Alumnus Hiroshi Sugimoto in Conversation with Jori Finkel,” Sugimoto spoke with Finkel, a New York Times journalist, about his experience at the College, his special sense of space and light, stories behind some of his photographs, art and architecture, and his advice for students.

“I started as a photographer, and I was very, very educated here,” said Sugimoto, who was born in Tokyo in 1948, and moved to the United States in 1970 to study at the College. “Thanks to ArtCenter, I was trained as a very, very good craftsman.”

The conversation in ArtCenter’s packed Ahmanson Auditorium coincided with the opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Selected Works from the Collection of Phillip Sarofim at the Mullin Transportation Design Center's Hover Space at ArtCenter’s South Campus. On view through November 3, the micro-exhibition features five Sugimoto works from the collection of ArtCenter Trustee Sarofim, and two works courtesy of the Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles. The talk was followed by an award dinner for Sugimoto.

Included in the exhibition is Sugimoto’s 2006 sculpture Mathematical Model 009, Surface of Revolution with Constant Negative Curvature, which features an aluminum cone, on a mirrored glass base, that stretches upwards to a single infinity point. The exhibition’s 2018 photographs Opticks 016 and Opticks 068 depict the yellow, blue and green color of light that Sugimoto observed through a prism. His 2011 glass artwork Five Elements: Dead Sea, En Gedi (#375), based on geometric symbols from 13th-century Buddhism, encases a piece of film from his Seascape series: photographs he’s taken of oceans and seas since 1980.

“His work is hugely thought-provoking and very ethereal,” said Sarofim, at the opening. “There's nothing more pleasing than sharing his work with students, faculty and staff at ArtCenter. The most important thing is inspiring the next generation of thinkers, artists, disruptors.”

That is exactly what Sugimoto did in conversation with Finkel. The Ahmanson Auditorium audience was filled with students, alumni, faculty, staff, ArtCenter Board of Trustee members—including Sarofim and Kevin Bethune (MS 12 Industrial Design)—and members of the ArtCenter giving group ArtCenter100 that included founder and Trustee Emeritus Alyce de Roulet Williamson. Sugimoto’s wife Atsuko Koyanagi (BFA 78 Graphics and Packaging)—founder of Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi—and 2022 ArtCenter Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award recipient Bob Gurr (BS 52 Transportation Design) were also in attendance.

ArtCenter President Karen Hofmann (BS 97 Product Design) started off the evening praising Sugimoto as “a very special alum here at ArtCenter,” and introduced a video about Sugimoto that was produced, written and directed by alum Matthew Rolston (BFA 78 Photography and Imaging). Photography Chair Everard Williams (BFA 89) introduced Finkel and Sugimoto, who Williams called “a master of photography who transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.” A video by Casa Brutus showcased the sprawling and conceptual Enoura Observatory, which Sugimoto designed for his Odawara Art Foundation, which he founded to promote and cultivate Japanese art and culture. Sugimoto has long called the Enoura Observatory his legacy.

Asked by Finkel about his journey from Tokyo to ArtCenter, Sugimoto talked about first studying economics and becoming a ’60s student activist. His father imported American pharmaceuticals to Japan, and Sugimoto—the eldest son—was expected to take over his family’s business. “Watching me as an activist, ‘Oh no, this is no good,’” said Sugimoto, laughing. “My younger brother—much better.” Sugimoto’s family supported his love of photography, and going to ArtCenter.

As an ArtCenter student, Sugimoto found text by photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams (who taught as a guest instructor at the College in the late 1930s) about mixing chemicals. “I tried almost all of his recipes,” said Sugimoto. “I tested, and I think achieved, Ansel Adams’ printing and a few negative making methods, called ‘the zone system.’” Asked if he had any advice for young ArtCenter students, Sugimoto was direct with his answer. “Not to copy me,” he said, chuckling. “Do something different.”

After graduating, Sugimoto moved to New York City, started doing commercial photography, and then quickly discovered conceptual artists and minimalist artists such as Don Flavin. “Okay, this is my field—I was getting the same kind of twisted mentality,” Sugimoto said, laughing. “I wanted to be a member of this conceptual art [field] and contemporary art. … I asked myself, ‘If I can push photography to be pushed up to be serious art—that's my vision.’”

One of Sugimoto’s most celebrated photographs, for instance, is a 1976 photograph of a polar bear on an ice floe, growling at a seal, its recent kill. Striking and realistic, Polar Bear is actually a photograph of a diorama at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. As with many of his photos, Sugimoto used a 19th-century style technical view camera with 8-by-10-inch black-and-white film and a long exposure time to create the photograph.

Among other famed works that Finkel and Sugimoto discussed were his decades-long (beginning in 1975) series of blank, overexposed movie screens in dark, empty theaters, and his large-scale 2023 artwork Brush Impression, Heart Sutra, which presents a central scripture of East Asian Buddhism, and is set to make its American debut at the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form at L.A.’s Lisson Gallery from November 15 to January 11.

When asked by Finkel about receiving ArtCenter’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Alumni Award, and how the two-dimensional art of photography paved the way for Sugimoto to work in three dimensions—from creating sculptures to designing architecture and establishing an architecture firm—Sugimoto paused to reflect.

“I have my own special sense of space,” he said. “My vision is kind of three dimensional, but placed in the two dimension—that’s photography. The sense of the balance, the sense of the space—I have my own. So I can apply it to photography, architecture, sculpture. It’s the same thing.”

At the post-event dinner, Rolston joyfully presented Sugimoto with his award. “You've shown us that time is a key element in image making, and if there is any truth in a photograph, it's that it may serve as a memory device,” he said to Sugimoto. “Your work has explored ideas about light, space, color, identity, even questioning our place in the universe. These are the biggest questions we can ask. These are beautiful ideas. They're great teachings, and you have expressed them masterfully, and you've exquisitely crafted imagery.”

To that, Sugimoto joked during his acceptance speech, “This is too early to give to me. My achievement is still to come.” He added, remembering the confidence boost he received from the late Photography Chair Charlie Potts, who told him, as a graduating student, that he would have no problem getting any job. “I refused to be a commercial photographer, and I decided to be an artist,” said Sugimoto on the impact of that encouragement. “I owe him a lot, and I owe ArtCenter a lot.”