HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

In 2026, Singapore Art Museum announced Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form is Emptiness (29 May–4 October 2026), the artist’s first major exhibition in Southeast Asia and his first large-scale solo show devoted to his practice in the region. Following this, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction will open at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) from 16 June to 13 September 2026, presenting 13 photographic series from the 1970s to the present.

While widely recognised as one of the most significant artists working with the photographic medium today, Sugimoto’s multidisciplinary practice also extends to architecture, sculpture and art direction for performing arts productions.

Early Life and Career

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto grew up in postwar Japan and first encountered photography through hobbyist cameras before studying at Rikkyo University. After travelling through the Soviet Union and Europe, he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to study at the Art Center College of Design, California where he deepened his engagement with Marcel Duchamp and other conceptual and Surrealist artists. In 1974 he relocated to New York, exploring museums, cinema, and the city’s architecture as raw material for his work, while supporting himself as a dealer in Japanese antiquities in SoHo.

Early visits to the American Museum of Natural History led to his breakthrough Dioramas series, marking a pivotal shift from casual photography to a sustained conceptual practice. Sugimoto has described how closing one eye while looking at the animal displays made the scenes appear eerily real, a discovery that revealed to him “a way to see the world as a camera does” and set the course for his subsequent investigations of perception and representation.

Works, Series and Methods

Dioramas

Begun in the mid-1970s, Dioramas focuses on displays in natural history museums, photographed so that painted backdrops and taxidermy cohere into convincing visions of nature. Using a large-format camera and careful framing, Sugimoto removes visual cues that might reveal the scenes as artificial, allowing the image to oscillate between document and illusion while critiquing how museums construct knowledge. Later works such as Olympic Rain Forest (2012) extend this interest in representation to actual landscapes, shifting his attention from fabricated dioramas to living environments.

Theaters

In the celebrated Theaters series (begun 1978), Sugimoto records entire films in a single exposure, leaving the shutter open for the duration of the screening so that the projected images condense into a glowing white screen framed by the auditorium’s architecture. Photographed in ornate movie palaces, drive-ins, and later opera houses and concert halls, these works transform narrative cinema into an abstract block of light and foreground the theater as a social and historical space.

Seascapes

Since 1980, the ongoing Seascapes series has involved photographing oceans around the world with the horizon precisely bisecting the frame, reducing sea and sky to subtly modulated bands of tone. Shot with long exposures in locations ranging from the Arctic Ocean to the Tasman Sea, the images present the sea as a timeless constant, inviting viewers to imagine prehistoric or even primordial time. In 2009, U2 selected Sugimoto’s photograph Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993) from the series for the cover of their album No Line on the Horizon, underscoring the project’s wide cultural resonance.

Portraits and Sea of Buddha

Sugimoto’s Portraits series (begun in 1999 as a Deutsche Guggenheim commission) comprises photographs of wax figures from Madame Tussauds and other collections, including replicas of historical rulers and cultural icons. Shot with lighting that carefully recreates that of Old Master paintings and printed at large scale, these portraits echo classical oil portraiture while revealing the uncanny status of wax effigies as both likeness and simulacrum.

Sea of Buddha (photographed in 1995 and first exhibited later in the 1990s) documents the 1,001 Buddhist statues at Sanjūsangendō (Hall of Thirty-Three Bays) in Kyoto under specially arranged conditions, with modern additions removed and natural morning light emphasized. Shot from elevated viewpoints and focused on the gilded bodhisattvas, the series transforms this historic devotional environment into a serial field of nearly identical figures, emphasizing repetition, stillness, and spiritual presence

Conceptual Forms and Scientific Instruments

From the early 2000s Sugimoto has developed Conceptual Forms and related works based on mathematical models and scientific instruments. Photographing plaster and metal models in stark light, he renders complex equations and physical laws as sculptural forms, linking his interest in abstraction to histories of science and design. These works expand his investigation of how human intellect shapes the visible world.

Lightning Fields and camera-less photography

In Lightning Fields (2009), Sugimoto abandoned the camera, using a 400,000-volt Van de Graaff generator to apply electrical charges directly to large sheets of film. The resulting images of branching sparks and dense textures evoke both scientific experiment and natural phenomena, extending his exploration of light and time into the realm of camera-less photography.

Architecture, Pines and Landscape

Sugimoto’s Architecture series (1997) presents blurred images of iconic modernist buildings, produced by setting the lens-to-film distance to what he calls “twice-infinity” so that forms dissolve into spectral silhouettes. Earlier architectural commissions, such as large-format photographs of notable buildings for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in the late 1990s, and the Joe series (2003) depicting Richard Serra‘s sculpture Joe at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, extend his interest in how structures are experienced over time.

In landscape-based projects, including a series on famous Japanese pine sites (meisho) such as Miho no Matsubara, Matsushima, and Amanohashidate (photographed 2001), Sugimoto adapts the atmospheric style of Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees (Shōrin-zu byōbu) screens (circa 1590) to photography, aligning his work with historical Japanese painting traditions.

Architecture Practice and Spatial Design

Beyond photography, Sugimoto founded an architecture practice in Tokyo, New Material Research Laboratory (est. 2008), to design museums, shrines, restaurants, and exhibition environments. Projects include the Shinto Go’o Shrine (Appropriate Proportion) for Naoshima Contemporary Art Center (opened 2002), the Glass Tea House Mondrian for Le Stanze del Vetro at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), and a sculpture and rock garden for restaurants in Tokyo and Yamanashi Prefecture. He has also undertaken major commissions such as Point of Infinity (2023), a nearly 70-foot stainless-steel needle that functions as a sundial on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay.

Themes and Context

Sugimoto uses photography to test the relationship between reality and representation, asking how images shape our understanding of history, nature, and collective memory. His work aligns with conceptual art in its emphasis on clear ideas and repeatable processes, yet it is also deeply informed by minimalism and Japanese aesthetics, particularly in the restrained compositions of Seascapes and the meditative repetition of Sea of Buddha.

Time is Sugimoto’s central material: long exposures and serial formats allow him to compress hours of cinema into a single frame, evoke geological or cosmic duration in ocean views, or register instantaneous electrical discharges in Lightning Fields. His interest in architecture and exhibition design situates his practice within broader conversations about how spaces frame perception, from the cinematic auditorium in Theaters to the carefully choreographed layouts of his own exhibitions and the dedicated Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery at Benesse Art Site Naoshima (opened 2022). Throughout, his images maintain a cool, precise surface that encourages slow, contemplative looking rather than spectacle.

Major Institutional Exhibitions

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s institutional exhibitions include:

• Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time (2005–07), touring retrospective including Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and other venues.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine (2023–24), survey exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form is Emptiness (2026), Singapore Art Museum, 29 May–4 October 2026.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction (2026), The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 16 June–13 September 2026.

Awards and Accolades

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s awards include:

• Mainichi Art Prize, Japan (1988).
• Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, Gothenburg, Sweden (2001).
• PhotoEspaña Prize, Madrid (2006)
• Praemium Imperiale (Painting), Japanese Art Association (2009).
• Medal with Purple Ribbon, Government of Japan (2010).
• Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (2013).
• Isamu Noguchi Award (2014).

Public Collections

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is represented in numerous institutional collections, including the following:

• The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
• The Art Institute of Chicago.
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• Tate, London.
• Centre Pompidou, Paris.
• Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.
• National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT).
• Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
• Benesse Art Site Naoshima, including the Hiroshi Sugimoto Gallery: Time Corridors.

Hiroshi Sugimoto FAQs

Ocula | 2026