HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: This is my studio in New York,
and I am on the 11th floor facing north sky.
This is a very traditional 19th-century painters
studio in Paris.
And I... I'm not using any artificial light here.
And all I do is this, you know, shading up and down
and then I can control the light.
To me, this system,
this method, still makes the best quality picture.
Uh our, uh... we think we keep making inventions
and makes tools as sophisticated as possible,
but to me contemporary people tend to...
tend to rely onto the computer method
and all the machines.
That's not good enough.
You need something more than that.
So this system, it's very hard to control,
but it still makes the best picture.
So I'm against a kind of evolution, you know,
this is...
[ laughing ]
I am sticking to the traditional method.
[ machine beeping ]
I am very craft-oriented person.
But at the same time,
I want to make something artistic.
The fossils works almost the same as photography.
To me, photography functions as a fossilization of the time.
[ liquid dripping ]
How my architectural series started,
I visited so many early 20th-century architecture.
They are all famous.
They look so beautiful in the book,
but if you actually go there,
it's 60, 70, 80 years old.
They are, most of them, in very bad conditions.
To make them out-of-focus picture, all the wrinkles disappeared.
Stillness, well, that's something
I'm not intentionally, you know, promoting it,
but most of the people sees it
and it's very quiet and serene.
Uh seascapes case,
my subject matter is water and air.
That's the kind of...
most kind of abstract theme.
I find a spot that I want to stay,
and I stay there
maybe sometimes one week,
sometimes a couple weeks, two, three weeks.
And then I just stay there, and just feel like I'm a part of this, you know, nature and landscape.
So far, I visited so many different seas,
but I never be on the boat.
I have to be on the ground.
I start feeling this is the creation of the universe
and I'm witnessing it.
Well, this is my miniature seascapes, Day and Night.
And I wind this up and it shakes.
So this is my, you know, famous Japanese earthquake.
Shall I do it here?
Whoa.
Well, this is one of my fossil collection,
450 million years old.
And in this cabinet...
I call this cabinet as my Shinto shrine,
portable Shinto shrine.
I have this mirror here
and, well, the Japanese Shinto shrine,
they always keep the mirror inside,
that's probably the reflection of the old memory, ancestors.
And, you know, this is...
I'm worshiping our ancestors.
This is the earliest stage of the life formation in the world.
So this is what I have to pay respect.
Two years ago, I was commissioned to build
a Shinto shrine in Japan.
You know, it's a religious institution
and it's still active,
but the building itself, it's so old and deteriorated so
I was commissioned to rebuild this Shinto shrine.
So this is exactly 30 years
since I first came to see this Large Glass,
to see this Duchamp piece.
Actually that was the year
I came to New York from California, after spending
three years in California as an art student.
And...
that was the first things I did,
make a short trip from New York to Philadelphia
to see this Duchamp piece.
It seems strong and important.
The way you read it is your own creation.
He is kind of stimulating a kind of very abstract thinking
of the kind of metaphors.
So there's no one answer to describe this, you know.
Well, this is the miniature which I made.
This was actually photographed in Tokyo,
and what I photographed was the replica of The Large Glass.
I use eight-by-ten camera.
This is the original negative here
sandwiched between the two thick glass like this.
And then this side is the positive actually,
the contact print from the other side, negative.
I wasn't so aware of Duchamp's influence, but...
but after reaching at my age now, I...
I feel very strongly how... how much
effect that he did affect
on my career in art.
What I'm working on now is my show at the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
The Cartier Foundation, it's a glass box,
it's a huge glass box.
I'm presenting a three-dimensional Duchamp
Large Glass presentation in my way of presentation.
This is the bachelor section.
And this is the bride section.
This is each nine figures as a bachelor
that's being represented
as more like a machine-like figure.
That's why I'm related to this
collection of my machine photographs.
The machine models were 19th century.
They served to demonstrate
the very basic machine movement for the student.
We are getting into this upper part of the section
called the "bride section."
So this is... there's supposed to be a bride
with this very interesting
formation of cloud-like shapes.
That's kind of feminine to me, so
I decided to compare with my mathematical forms, like this.
This was made to be... to show a student what's the mathematics,
you know, three-dimensional mathematic theories can be seen
in actual three-dimensional models.
I was very bad in mathematics
when I was a high school student.
I loved physics, but my lack of understanding of mathematics
made me think that I am not the proper person
to get into physics.
You know, I found that I'm quite a visual person;
I have to confirm everything by my eye.
So I became more like a visual artist.
Every museum show, I try to design the space.
It's very important.
It's not just a photography show.
It's more like I'm designing the space.
It's just a...
like a space sculpture, like.
I want people to get puzzled first, you know.
As people walk in, the first...
probably people may think this is a minimalist sculpture show.
And then came all the way into the space and came back
and all of a sudden this is a photography show.
So people pay only one admission
and get to see two different kind of show.
It's... very heavily discounted.
I have so many ideas being cooked in my brain
and they seem like all impossible.
But sometimes it's...
it becomes reality.
So this is through my translation of my visual,
like, visual understanding of how... how I see things.
And then make... make imagination possible
to be able to show to everybody
that's the task of artist, I think.