Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
ven on a dismal winter's day, the photography studio of artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is drenched in natural light. Rays pour through a series of tall windows that proffer spectacular panoramas of Manhattan. Like many of the neighboring buildings in Chelsea, the studio used to be an industrial space. This seems apt—today, a handful of assistants work quietly, their calm productivity lending to the Zen aura of the space. Beyond the studio is a large office where the slight and spry Japanese-born artist waits to greet me. With the formal manners of his native country, Sugimoto shakes my hand, slightly bowing by way of hello. He is dressed in sports-casual clothes—plush inky-blue velour jacket, grey-blue slacks and a pristine white T-shirt—and his silver hair is neat and short, with a friendly face etched with smile lines. We sit down at a long meeting table, which is one of four benches in the room. The others include an office desk and a large windowsill, which contains curios from Sugimoto's personal collection, such as parts of a meteorite. There is also an architectural drawing station for the artist's designs: something of a Renaissance man, Sugimoto runs an architecture studio in Tokyo as well as maintaining his artistic practice. The firm is called New Material Research Laboratory, "a cynical name because I only use traditional or forgotten materials," Sugimoto says, his face creasing in amusement. At heart, Sugimoto is a conceptual artist. He has referred to Duchamp as his "trauma" and there are homages to the French artist throughout the office, such as a large framed photograph of a Duchampian upturned bicycle wheel. This month, Sugimoto launches a foray into spectacles in a project inspired by Oculist Witness, which was a section of Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) and later produced as an individual piece with Richard Hamilton in 1967. The luxury lenses, which are available at Selima Optique, recall the heavy equipment used in eye exams and riff on the unreliable idea of the eye as a camera. Works by the artist hang on the walls, as does a map with stickers demarcating the boundaries of the land in Japan on which Sugimoto is building his own compound, the Enoura Complex, which will house the Odawara Art Foundation. Scheduled to open sometime in 2018, the foundation is set on more than 10,000 square feet by the coast in Odawara, approximately an hour southwest of Tokyo. It will be in the "public domain—I shouldn't serve for myself but for culture, civilization," he says. The site encompasses a gallery, a Japanese teahouse, a contemporary Noh theatre, a 200-foot underground tunnel and an original 15th-century entrance gate. As in much of Sugimoto's work, there is a focus on preserving or reimagining overlooked parts of culture. "It seems like nobody else is going to do it. I am the only survivor," he says. "Even though I live outside Japan, I know Japan very well, and I am going to have to do this." Sugimoto has designed the space so that on a handful of occasions each year the building will effectively appear to harness the sun. "As long as the current axis of the world remains the same, it will happen four times a year," he says. For example, during the winter solstice "on the shortest day of the year, the sun will come up from the sea and its light will go through the tunnel," Sugimoto says. During the equinox, twice each year, the sun will travel through the gallery. The Celts designed buildings this way, he says—like the Japanese, they observed the spiritual in nature. "Before Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, we shared an ancient mentality and spirituality through nature," he says. It takes patience to wait for the Earth to turn on its axis in order to capture the sun's light. But Sugimoto is a patient man. His bodies of work often unfurl over decades, such as the ongoing Dioramas series—uncanny photographs of the habitat displays in New York's American Museum of Natural History, such as a polar bear eyeing a seal or our prehistoric forebears—which he began working on in 1974. This month, Sugimoto revisits a body of work that he first created in 1995, Sea of Buddha, for a new exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York running through early March. "It was first shown in my first serious museum exhibition in 1995 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I wanted to make it all big. It took this much time," he says. "It is finally complete." Sugimoto will show "36 large-size prints together—thousands of images of Buddha in total," using the original negatives but printed at a larger scale of 47 x 58.75 inches. Sugimoto began the project of enlarging the prints in 2010 because of the precision required in balancing tonalities across the set. "To make one print from one negative is fine but to do that in 36 prints took this amount of time," he says. "Paper quality and chemicals changed—everything changes. My eyesight changed. But it has to look the same quality, and that's very hard work." The images of endlessly repeating Buddhas were taken decades ago in "a very snobbish, high-end Buddhist temple." It took Sugimoto seven years just to get permission to photograph the Kyoto Sanjῡsangen-dō temple. It is "a famous national treasure built in the 12th century, containing nearly 1,000 almost human-sized Buddha statues lined up," he says. The inspiration behind the project was lateral: A visit to artist Walter De Maria's The Broken Kilometer in New York, a work comprising 500 polished, round, solid brass rods, spurred a memory of this temple, which Sugimoto had visited as a child. The temple and its repetition of the armed Buddhas, who look the same but are each slightly different, struck Sugimoto as "12th-century conceptual art, so ahead of its time." The photographs will be installed within "an architecturally ambitious setting," Sugimoto says. He has designed an oval-shaped wall that visitors will walk through from Pace Gallery's entrance on 25th Street in Chelsea. The ceiling will be covered by a white scrim to create "one big sheet of light—filtered beautifully, soft, diffuse." As well as the large-format photographs, Sugimoto will show a "video projection based on images of the nearly 1,000 Buddhas—I re-photographed the photograph and made it a moving image so that from one section to the next, the position of the Buddha standing is slightly different," he says. "When it is sequenced, the Buddha starts moving toward you. It is like a North Korean army marching. It's called Accelerated Buddha—starts out slowly and then speeds up." By the end, there are 64 frames per second—"so speedy it melts down," Sugimoto says. "You'll be able to see one million Buddhas within the five minutes," he says. The work is a "representation of life after life, a kind of paradise in the Buddhist concept," he says. "You will become enlightened after you see this—it's free enlightenment. You don't even have to buy it," he says, pausing for a beat before adding with comic timing: "But if you do purchase the work, it's 100-percent guaranteed enlightenment." In this work, Sugimoto says he is "investigating the afterlife while still alive." He regularly uses his work to travel back and forth in time, whether freezing views of oceans seemingly unaltered by eternity in his ongoing Seascapes series, or photographing wax figures of historical characters such as Henry VIII in his Portraits series, blurring the line between reality and artifice. "I am an intentional liar. Photography is a multi-layered lie. It is a mechanical reproduction of reality," Sugimoto says. "It is not possible for a machine to make art, only a human spirit can make art. But I am purely machine in my mind—my mind is a machine and my mother and father made it. It's like a clockwork orange." CULTURED 147 E