Tickets for Naohiko Umewaka’s performance at Dia 25 years ago today of Zeami’s classic 14th century Noh drama, Yashima, with lighting, stage, and set by Hiroshi Sugimoto, went on sale September 12, 2001. I was not in the mood then, and the punny title, Noh Such Thing As Time, didn’t help. Also something about the two monumental, multipanel photos of pine trees did not sit right with me then or since. I did not like the book. So despite my absolute transfiguration by his 1995 Time Exposed (Buddha Series), it took me a while to accommodate Sugimoto’s explorations of traditional Japanese art and culture into my understanding of his practice.
But I’ve been thinking about Sugimoto’s large-scale works, and these photos, known as Pine Trees (2001) since May, when I visited Sanjūsangen-dō again, and looked at Tacita Dean’s large-scale pictures of Japanese trees. And I think I get it, sort of. Partially.
Sugimoto explains his Pine Trees photos, in Japanese artistic terms, as copies of Pine Forest, a pair of 16th century six-panel screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku at the Tokyo National Museum, which are revered as national treasures. Maybe he felt creating photos for a classical traditional context like Noh required this more explicit referential framework. But these are not copies. If only because Sugimoto’s rather stuffed composition–he photographed trees singly or in pairs, I think, on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, and then aligned them in contiguous scenes—lacks the power of Hasegawa’s emptiness.
But it’s the reference to screens as a medium of scale and space that feels fruitful, with more potential, frankly, than the hyper-tastefully melodramatic 2009 installation of Pine Trees in Naoshima, Coffin of Light, which feels like the Minimalist language Sugimoto explored so richly with his Seascapes hit a decorative dead end. [There’s a whole Sugimoto Gallery on Naoshima now, designed by the artist, which I mention—along with this whole post, frankly—because DC is about to get another node in the Unified Sugimoto-verse when the Hirshhorn’s redesigned sculpture garden and Mall tunnel entrance open in a few days.]
Now about the screens. Sugimoto has now produced at least three monumental photographic editions, pigment printed on rice paper, as six-panel folding screens. He showed two of them at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in 2023. [Next morning update: there’s at least nine, a whole medium.] The dimensions would indicate that they’re intended to be shown standing free on a ground, not extended flat on a wall. The accordion shape echoes in the best way—though the direction of the reference is probably the opposite—the leporello foldout artist book, Sea of Buddha. [By now I guess I’ll note that fine, the Noh Time Like the Present or whatever book was also accordion-style.]
The one above, of the Kasuga Taisha (Grand Shrine) in Nara, was also shown at the shrine museum in 2021-2, alongside an exhibition of Shintō relics and artifacts curated by Sugimoto. The exhibition marked the journey of the spirit of the shrine to a newly dedicated Shintō shrine on Sugimoto’s oceanview Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa.
In his explorations of time, Sugimoto’s architectural and material paths usually end up at the antique or the archaic, if not the downright prehistoric. He was and always has been an admirer and collector of artifacts, but he’s been making objects and structures not for the now, but for the far future as discovered ruins. Maybe this weaving of his practice into the centuries-old traditions of Japan is, like his embrace of the explicitly spiritual, part of his attempt to, if not necessarily be remembered, then to at least leave a trace.