Linke - Artinfo

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Hiroshi Sugimoto at
the unveiling of
“Couleurs de l’Ombre,”
his collaboration with
Hermès presented at
the Museum der
Kulturen in Basel last
June. Opposite page:
a scene from
Sugimoto bunraku:
Sonezaki shinju, the
artist’s re-envisioning
of a classic of
traditional Japanese
puppet theater.
Sotheby’S
hiroShi Sugimoto and odawara art foundation. oppoSite page: tadzio and hermÈS
Japan’s Master Photographer
Turns His
Focus to Theater
on january 1, hiroshi sugimoto headed two hours southwest
of Tokyo and set up his camera equipment at the oceanfront
of the town of Atami. The 64-year-old artist worked for only a few
hours early in the morning, “before the sun comes up too high.”
He took about twenty rolls of film, using an old-fashioned largeformat
camera.
“New Year’s Day is the best time to take these photos, because
you have less chance of traffic on the sea. Fishermen are resting and
there are very few boats for a few days,” he quips.
The new photographs are part of “Seascapes,” the artist’s
ongoing series of black-and-white images of the sea and its horizon,
which he started in 1980. But they will not be shown in public
for many months: Sugimoto takes his time, giving painstaking
attention to each one in order to fully render a rich palette of blacks,
whites, and grays. “First I have to send the film to New York for
processing. Then I have to choose the most successful photographs
and print them, and then there is the final mounting and framing.
So this takes a very long time,” he explains.
While photography remains the artistic medium for which
Sugimoto is best known internationally, in the last 12 years
he has stretched his creativity in a new direction: the performing
arts. This year, most of his energy will be focused on the
production, staging, and directing of Noh and bunraku (puppet)
theater performances.
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
By Sonia KoleSniKov-JeSSop
theartist
Hiroshi Sugimoto
At the end of March, Sugimoto is collaborating with renowned
kyogen actor Mansai Nomura to present “Sanbaso: Divine Dance”
at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the museum’s Frank
Lloyd Wright rotunda, Nomura will perform Japan’s oldest
celebratory dance of thanks to the gods, in costume and setting
designed by Sugimoto. In Paris in October, Sugimoto will present
his vision of another traditional Japanese performing-art form
with an adaptation of the famed bunraku play The Love Suicides
at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinju). The artist collaborated in adapting the
classic play and first presented his production, which he
also directed, in 2011 at Yokohama’s Kanagawa Arts Theater.
Written in 1703 by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Love
Suicides at Sonezaki revolves around a young clerk and his
courtesan lover, who, after realizing that they cannot stay
together, commit double suicide. Based on an actual event, the
play in turn inspired so many copycat suicides that in 1723 its
performance was banned by the Tokugawa Shogunate. By the
time it was revived more than 200 years later in 1955, many of the
original lines and directions for puppet handling had been lost.
Sugimoto stresses that, while he is keen to preserve tradition,
he also wants to draw on his own 21st-century sensibility and
tinker a bit with conventions. In his production, all puppeteers
are masked so the audience can focus on the puppets, and he
reinstated a shortened version of the traditional prologue, which
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