Hiroshi Sugimoto in “Memory” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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.