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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Becoming an Artist

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When I was a college student in Tokyo, my study was German Philosophy and also Marxist Economics,

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And also, Hegel, Kant... I was trying to catch up with the Western philosophy.

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Socialism and Communism--now it's been taken as a kind of a failed theory or failed thinking,

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But, back in that time, that was one of the dream theories of how people can live together peacefully and nicely.

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And then, when I moved to California, everybody was talking about the Zen and Buddhism,

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So, I spent like three years in California studying Oriental Philosophy by myself to catch up, actually.

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[Laughs] So it goes the other way around.

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1974...Well, that was the kind of flower movement--flower children movement--so I was really into that.

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[LAUGHS]

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So I didn't pay that much attention to the serious art.

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Only after I moved to New York in 1974, I started realizing how important and interesting art can be.

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Do you see this? It can be spottable.

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I'm very interested in early 20th Century, 19th Century movement of Modernism.

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So, it's like an idealism, in general. And soon Realism and Dada.

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That's also trying to search the expansion of the human ability to see things in a different way.

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So, they are all like very ambitious adventurism in a way.