Book: Hiroshi Sugimoto Origins of Art

This book was published in connection with a groundbreaking year-long project held at our museum beginning in November 2010, in which a series of exhibitions focused on the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto were organized under four overarching themes: science, architecture, history, and religion.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948-) began working as a photographer in the mid-1970s. His works, born of meticulously developed concepts and superb technical execution, possess a refined beauty that continues to captivate viewers around the world. To explore the full depth of Sugimoto’s art, our museum launched an unprecedented and ambitious project between 2010 and 2011: a year -long project featuring a single artist through four different exhibitions, each with a unique theme. Guided by Sugimoto’s remark, “To see what lies ahead, we must first look back,” each of the four exhibitions developed a consistent theme: tracing the origins of art—and, by extension, the origins of human consciousness—through four key concepts explored across his body of work.

As Sugimoto notes in the preface, this publication is “neither a catalogue, nor a critical anthology, nor a collection of poems, nor a monologue—something else.” In keeping with that description, it brings together a wide range of content, including installation views, statements about the exhibited works, reference images, and essayistic texts.

This book offers a full sense of the fascination of the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Origin of Art, with its unprecedentedly profound theme of tracing the origins of human spiritual history and human consciousness through the medium of art, as well as the fascinating world of Sugimoto's art.

Also included is a conversation with anthropologist Shinichi Nakazawa, held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2009.

(CONTENTS) 

・Preface 

・Origins of Art 

・Optical Glass Five-Storied Pagoda 

・Ancient Landscape 

・Cold Eyes and Hot Eyes 

・Memories of Treasures 

・A place tempted by evil

・Beginning of Photography 

・A Life with a Punchline  

・The Form of Concepts 

・ODAHARA

・Parrot Bird Cages 

・Painting of the Descent of Angels 

・Distorted Sense of Space 

・Floating Bridge of Time 

・Sansuyu Tea Ceremony 

・Now in the Netherwold

・Falling Stone Caution 

・Having received the Premium Imperiale

・Dialogue: History of History (Hiroshi Sugimoto & Shinichi Nakazawa) 

・Afterword

Size: 20.7 cm (H), 15.1 cm (W), 2.7 cm (H) 

Weight: 640 g 

Other, special note: Japanese, A5 size, 223 pages in total, 55 Plates (including 18 monochrome pages) 

Author: Hiroshi Sugimoto 

Publisher: SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co.,Ltd 

Release date: January 18, 2012 

ISBN: 978-4-10-478103-4