A new retrospective, Photopainting, reveals an artist who reinvented the twentieth-century US avant-garde with idiosyncratic approaches to traditional Japanese aesthetics
Kunié Sugiura doesn’t just take pictures. Since relocating from Nagoya to attend art school in Chicago, she has absorbed, applied and expanded upon many aspects of US avant-garde art practices of the twentieth century’s second half, bringing multiple techniques from other artforms into her principal practice of photography along with idiosyncratic approaches to traditional Japanese aesthetics. In some pieces she applies graphite, a drafter’s tool, to photographs, as in Yellow Mum (1969) and Sea Shell II (1969), two of the more than 60 works on view in Photopainting, her engrossing six-decade retrospective at SFMOMA. The exhibition also includes cameraless photograms and X-rays, irregularly shaped frames that verge on sculpture and pigments paired with photo emulsion that evoke a painterly mode. Piet Mondrian meets Robert Rauschenberg in, for instance, Where to and Sidewalk Palms (both 1980).
In Sugiura’s early Cko series (1966–67), the human figure is both hypersensual and grotesque – for instance, the protuberant hand and obscured face in Cko #17 (1967) – qualities heightened by extreme shifts in colour. In this series, she favours bold, psychedelic purples and chartreuses. Taking advantage of the morphing and isolating qualities of fisheye lenses, these photographs (whose overarching title plays on kodoku, a Japanese word for ‘solitude’) reflect the loneliness the artist experienced as a foreigner in the US, as well as her interest in the existentialism of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Sugiura moved to New York immediately upon graduating in 1967, and further developed her practice at a time when Pop art was gaining traction. Printing images onto wood, such as in Deadend Street (1978), Sugiura takes up the formal and technical languages of Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, while producing subtler, less sensationalist and frenetic dynamics among her visual elements (and, notably, Sugiura generates her own imagery, eschewing the found and appropriated objects of ‘Pop’). The outcomes of Sugiura’s choices offer more muted contemplation of modern conditions and provide certain focused, spare pleasures for viewing – and for thinking about viewing art.
Deadend Street’s five panels are of different sizes, featuring two photographic images printed on wood, each with a black-painted wood panel to its left. In the centre of the pentaptych is a white rectangle. The simple, thin, unfinished wooden frame encompassing the five panels is deliberately asymmetrical, making a sort of sculptural claim while also unsettling conventions in the larger project of framing images for exhibition.
The two photographs in Deadend Street show the same view of a deserted street in New York City running under an elevated train-track towards a vanishing point, though the moments captured have different qualities: a rain-soaked pavement in one, a dry one in the other. The rhythm of the alternating panels creates a sense of looking at the stills of a moving-image work, or the sensation of blinking. Sugiura’s attention to space here can also be read in terms of the
Japanese notion of ma, or ‘pause’. In leaving blank panels between the images, Sugiura allows those images to ‘breathe’ while providing additional means for viewers to experience new perspectives on a familiar modern cityscape.
In the silver gelatin print of Embriwhoooh (1995), meanwhile, Sugiura imperfectly sutures together X-rayed fragments from different bodies to produce a monstrous, curving, homuncular skeleton toned with a faintly nauseating wash of green and yellow. With its suggestion of spilled organic fluids, the work alludes to life’s arbitrariness and precariousness, while calling attention to the constructed nature of representing any specimen or species. Dating from her experiences of receiving medical treatment during the 1990s, Sugiura’s cut-and-paste combinations of the human form communicate the fragmentary nature underlying all things, organically formed or manufactured, that might otherwise seem whole.
Drawing on other Japanese traditions of aesthetic and philosophical contemplation, Sugiura has also turned to flowers as metaphor for the ephemerality of both beauty and life. Sugiura ‘modernises’ and Westernises a denatured approach to the subject, eschewing any context of natural setting for the cut flowers while also highlighting less typically appreciated parts such as stalk and thorn. She does so by using gelatin silver (and, later, chromogenic) prints with highly restricted colour ranges, as in Roshomon (1995), Untitled positive (1997) and Lily Head Yellow (2005). In an even more defamiliarising formal approach, the close-cropped forms in Stacks, Irises (1996) appear stripped of the more recognisable aspects of a flowering plant. This and the stark toning of the gelatin silver give the impression of some subliminal organic infrastructure – the articulation of neural pathways, nervous systems or bone formations, perhaps: the evanescent stuff of life itself.
Photopainting at SFMOMA, San Francisco, through 14 September
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
