Design - Master Of Illusion

Ideas and inspiration from those in the know

- Y-Jean Mun-delsalle

Through his photographs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists, obscures and alters reality, blurring the boundaries between truth and illusion.

Following in the footsteps of artists such as Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Bernar Venet and Anish Kapoor who’ve held showcases at Chateau de Versailles, Hiroshi exhibited his works there in a four-month-long solo show that ended recently in April.

He’s best known for his mysterious and highly technical black-and-white images fashioned through a combination of 19th-century large-format camera, signature long exposure and 20cm x 25cm negatives. Throughout his career, the Japanese artist – who splits his time between Tokyo and New York – has been striving to make visible the notion of eternity through his art.

A Moment In Time

Hiroshi, who combines an Eastern way of thinking with Western cultural motifs, views photography as a medium for exploring the permanence behind the transient nature of all things. There’s almost a meditative quality to his art, even as he’s influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, especially Marcel Duchamp. He believes that the subject of photography is like a found object, and a photographer never makes an actual object, but just “steals” images from the world.

He views his work as a method for preserving time and memories. “That’s the character of the medium of photography – it can deal with time,” he notes. “It is a medium for recording time and history, a quality I use in my work. For me, photography is a kind of time machine. I can travel back in history and confront it with the future. I can almost bring back the dead to our world. That’s the magic of photography.”

Virtual Realities