When Kunié Sugiura set out to make life-size photograms of human subjects, she put a new spin on what it means to be “an artist’s artist.” A photogram is a direct image that is made on photosensitive paper without the use of a camera. Typically, small objects are displayed. Sugiura went larger and bolder. She asked other artists to pose, including Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Jasper Johns.
Beginning in 1999, working in enclosures that she sheathed in black plastic to reduce reflections, she made some photograms into full-length portraits, in four-panel composites that measured over six feet high.
“I happened to know Jasper, so I called and asked him, and he said, ‘Next spring,’” Sugiura recalled in March, when I visited her apartment and studio in New York’s Chinatown. She was preparing to ship a few laggard works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for her first American retrospective exhibition, “Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting,” on view through Sept. 14.
An elegant white-haired woman with gracefully erect posture and a dry wit, Sugiura, 82, cloaks an indomitable drive beneath a soft-spoken manner. “At the end of spring, I called Jasper again and said, ‘Can you do it?’” she continued. “He said, ‘Yes, if you come to Connecticut.’” She traveled to his home in Sharon, where he supplied her with a small shed and two assistants.
He asked how many photogram papers she intended to expose. “I had eight, but I didn’t want to seem greedy,” she recalled with a laugh. She used four, and he approved two. In a collaborative effort, for a portrait included in the SFMOMA show, he sat in profile and plunked his hand and arm on the same paper. To anyone familiar with Johns’s work, the silhouette of his face and the trademark hand motif are instantly recognizable.
Over a long career, Sugiura has used photography in ways that bend and hybridize the medium. Her artistic explorations began in 1963, when, undaunted by her lack of English fluency or American friends, she left Tokyo at age 20 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, hoping to become an artist. As for what that meant, she was a little vague. “I wasn’t sure I could be a painter,” she said. “I painted as a child, but that was a small pond.”
She was leaning toward industrial design when she saw in Chicago a recent Andy Warhol canvas of a Coca-Cola bottle. A painting in the mechanical style of a newspaper advertisement, it was impressively large. She was hooked.
Although Sugiura was influenced by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol, who silk-screened photographs they lifted from the media onto their painted canvases, her intentions were different. “She’s not about what the photographs are signifying in the culture,” said Erin O’Toole, head of photography at SFMOMA, who organized the show and edited the catalog. “For her, the photographs are personal. They are places she went.”
Before she left Japan, Sugiura was training to be a scientist “Because I am a female, I would never get a good job in science,” she decided. At the Art Institute school, her scientific curiosity motivated her to experiment freely in the color photography lab — diluting the chemicals, dipping the print in bleach, superimposing multiple exposures. “I did everything I could think of,” she said.
Inspired by the distorted black-and-white photographs of nudes that Bill Brandt produced with a fish-eye lens in the 1950s, she made her own versions, but in striking color combinations, such as apricot and lilac. She called the series “Cko,” her abbreviation of the Japanese word “kodoku,” which means solitude or loneliness.
She became a little less isolated after moving to New York in 1967 upon graduation. In an apartment on the Upper West Side, she embarked on a new body of work. After applying a photographic emulsion onto canvases as large as 6 by 8 feet, she placed a mirror at a 45-degree angle to her enlarger to print a gigantic photographic image. In the bathtub, she washed the canvas prints so painstakingly that they still look pristine.
These led to her large-scale prints of close-up studies of bark, rock, flowers and sand, which celebrate form over content. Textural and abstract, they are in the tradition of Man Ray’s long-exposure photograph of the dust forming on the “Large Glass” artwork of his friend Marcel Duchamp, which was published in a Surrealist magazine as a view from an airplane. Sugiura’s scale adds further disorientation. These “photocanvases” bear an affinity to the large “infinity net” paintings of Yayoi Kusama, another Japanese immigrant artist in New York.
In 1973, Sugiura moved into the 2,400-square-foot loft in Chinatown that she still occupies. Taking up painting to cope with an artistic block, she began combining paintings and photographs. That was the start of her “photopaintings,” in which she juxtaposed her photographs of urban scenes with monochrome paintings.
“Lots of things I take in New York City are generic landscapes,” she said. Then she decides what color paintings to place alongside the black-and-white pictures. There isn’t always a logical connection. “Sometimes it is totally irrational, but that is OK, because art is irrational,” she continued. Occasionally the fusion creates a palpable spark, as in “Christie Street,” 1976, where a photograph of the checkerboard windows of a downtown New York office building (on a misspelled street) is positioned alongside a painting of horizontal stripes, and the joined geometries sing.
With plucky resourcefulness, Sugiura has turned setbacks into advances. Hospitalized in 1990 for a collapsed lung, she was subjected to an X-ray every four hours while doctors monitored whether the rupture was closing. Over a three-week stay, a pile of X-rays accumulated. “I said, ‘I want them,’” Sugiura recalled. From 1992 to 2021, she arranged the films into Surrealist groupings — some skeletal, others insect-like or spiderwebby — and added monochrome panels. “X-ray is death or disease, and the color is life or hoping for life, so they are together,” she explained.
Sugiura was ahead of her time in overstepping the boundaries that divide different art forms. “I want to make something more complex than photography,” she said. As O’Toole, the curator, observes, “The themes persist but the form changes.” A restless reinvention is the constant. She is still figuring out what it means to be an artist.
Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting
Through Sept. 14, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd Street, San Francisco, (415) 357-4000; sfmoma.org.
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