Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto CityAichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto City

What’s On

Sugimoto Hiroshi

  • Contemporary Art
  • Aichi Arts Center

Exhibition

  • Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025
  • Sugimoto Hiroshi　Miyamoto Saburo　Mizutani Kiyoshi　Ota Saburo
  • ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee
  • Photo: ToLoLo studio
Description

Sugimoto Hiroshi has long explored the vast scope of natural history, which lies on a timescale extending from before the dawn of humanity until after our extinction, while investigating interstices between opposing concepts such as life and death, reality and fiction, and the natural and the artificial. With gelatin silver prints as his primary medium, he has produced numerous photographic series, including “Dioramas,” “Seascapes,” “Theaters,” “Architecture,” “Portraits,” and “Conceptual Forms.” For the latter series, he photographed 19th-century German plaster models originally used for mathematical instruction. In Sugimoto’s meditative images, time is compressed through long exposures and frozen within the frame, while the roles of the living and the inanimate are frequently reversed.
Sugimoto’s career began with the “Dioramas” series. In 1975, he was inspired by the astonishing detail of the wildlife dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, in which life and death seemed to share the same spaces. Over the next 40 years, he photographed dioramas in museums across the United States. The golden age of the AMNH’s diorama production was from the 1920s to the 1940s, and nearly all of the background paintings were by artists who had actually traveled to the depicted locations. Shot with more or less 20-minute exposures, Sugimoto’s images are so lifelike that they could easily be mistaken for pictures of living animals. The English word “shoot,” used in both photography and hunting, can evoke associations with death, but in these works Sugimoto conversely seeks to restore lost life through the camera. When we recognize dioramas as memorials to species driven to extinction by humanity’s relentless transformation of the planet through forces such as urbanization and war, these works may be seen as presenting, in the artist’s words, a “lost-human” perspective within the long arc of natural history.

Venue

Aichi Arts Center 10F
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

Profile

  • Born 1948 in Tokyo, Japan. Based in New York, USA.

A multi-disciplinary artist, Sugimoto works in photography, sculpture, installation, performing arts, architecture, gardening, and gastronomy. His art bridges Eastern and Western ideologies while examining the nature of time, perception, and the origins of consciousness. Sugimoto’s art works have been exhibited around the world and are in numerous public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His photographic series include Seascapes, Theaters, and Architecture. In 2008, he established the architecture firm New Material Research Laboratory. In 2009, he founded Odawara Art Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization to promote traditional Japanese performing arts and culture, and opened the Enoura Observatory to the public in 2017. Sugimoto was elected as a Member of the Japan Art Academy (2023, Tokyo), and designated as a Person of Cultural Merit (2017, Tokyo). Awards include the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society (2017, London), recognition as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2013, Paris), and the Praemium Imperiale in Honor of Prince Takamatsu (2009, Tokyo, Painting category).

Selected exhibitions
2024
Solo exhibitions, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery (London, UK)/UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, China)/Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia)
2018–19
Solo exhibitions, SUGIMOTO VERSAILLES: Surface of Revolution, The Estate of Trianon, Palace of Versailles (France)
2013
Solo exhibitions, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea)
2005
Solo exhibitions, Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time, Mori Art Museum, (2005, Tokyo, Japan)/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2006, Washington, D.C., USA)
2000
Solo exhibitions, Sugimoto: Portraits, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum (2000, Berlin, Germany)/Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain)/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum SoHo (2001, New York, USA)
  • “Polar Bear” 1975
  • © Hiroshi Sugimoto / Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi
  • Collection of the artist