Kunié Sugiura: Something Else

Born in Nagoya, Japan, on November 23, 1942, Sugiura was the only child of Yuki Sugiura and Seizo Tanaka. Before she turned two, her father was killed by an American bomb and her mother and aunt went to Tokyo to look for work. She spent the next four years with her grandmother in Shizuoka.

When it was time for Kunie to enter school, the four women reunited in Tokyo. In grade school, Sugiura’s classmates expected her to become a painter, and her work already exhibited its signature mix of emotion and displacement: “When I was eight years old,” she recalled in a 2012 interview with the gallerist Leslie Tonkonow, “my class went to paint the cherry blossoms in the park. I was so overwhelmed by all the flowers that instead I painted a large pine tree.”

Her family expected her to pursue something professional, even going so far as to arrange a live-in science tutor, and after high school Sugiura entered the physics program at Ochanomizu Women’s College. But she wasn’t happy there, particularly since a Japanese woman of her generation couldn’t hope to do anything with a physics degree but teach high school.

At her own high school reunion, though, she met a classmate who had entered Tokyo University of the Arts and seemed remarkably happy. Then another acquaintance, just returned from studying in the United States, told her about the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sugiura’s mother, who had found a job managing the American military trading post at Tachikawa, where she learned to like her country's former enemies, supported her daughter's interest. So did her grandmother, a woman Sugiura says “would have been a feminist” in another time. So she applied, was accepted, and, in the fall of 1963, left Tokyo alone -- taking a leave of absence from Ochanomizu, just in case.

Her first instructor, Kenneth Josephson, tried to steer her into documentary work, and for a year she obediently followed Japanese-American families around the midwestern metropolis with her camera. But when Josephson left on a Fulbright, to be replaced by the more indulgent Frank Barsotti, Sugiura started shooting what she really wanted -- nudes.

It was the first of many counterintuitive choices. Though she was inspired by Bill Brandt’s dramatic vistas of naked limbs, Sugiura wasn’t really interested in the body for its own sake. Instead she was after the timeless, almost abstract quality that a human body takes on when it’s shorn of historical context. So she shot her models in extreme fisheye closeup, printed them in seas of eery yellow and purple, and sometimes disintegrated their identities still further by repeating the images in collage-like clusters of multiple exposure. She named the series “CKO prints,” after the homophonous Japanese words for “alienation” and “individual,” and took them with her when, two days after graduating in the spring of '67, she flew to New York.

Her first year in the city she spent staying with friends, finding an apartment, working a variety of darkroom jobs. She interviewed with Richard Avedon, though he didn’t yet have the money for an assistant, and dated a physicist named Gerry Dorman. But when she and Dorman married, she began making art again, turning her 104th Street apartment into a studio and printing black and white photographs on canvas. Tightly focused studies of peeling tree bark, shadowy ivy leaves, or lovers embracing, the disconcertingly large images were at once a bid to be taken seriously in an art world that still ranked painting over photography and an expression of Sugiura’s lifelong impatience with the boundaries of her chosen medium.

Aside from their material innovation, most of these pieces were straightforward enough. But on the left side of one small canvas called “1 Min.,” Sugiura printed a photo of a statue, an exuberant naked child on a round pedestal in one of New York's Botanical Gardens. Behind the child was a brick wall and a thicket of trailing vines. To fill the rest of the canvas, Sugiura used photo developer to paint a grid of black dots. The effect was astonishing. The rough, gestural quality of the dots, set so close to the photo, seems to dissolve its crispness from within. But at the same time that very crispness lends the dots a photographic sheen and finish. The dots take on the specificity and vibrance of the statue, while the statue itself is cut loose to float away from the sensory world as a pure visual pattern. The two halves, in other words, meld and change places like lovers, imparting a sense of conceptual uncertainty that is somewhere between flying and falling.

In 1970 Sugiura took slides of some of these pieces downtown to Paula Cooper, who conceded that they were interesting but said she never made studio visits uptown. But she sent Sugiura back up to see Dick Bellamy, who warned her that it might take him two years to get around to visiting her. In fact he showed up in two weeks and promptly told her that everything she was making was terrible. Undaunted, Sugiura made new work and invited him back, and eventually, though he never formally showed her, Bellamy came to act as a kind of an agent, making introductions and occasionally brokering a sale. (One key figure he connected her to was the curator Marcia Tucker, who included her in the 1972 painting annual at the Whitney Museum.) He also briefly employed her as a secretary.

In 1973, Gerry Dorman got a job in Europe and Sugiura chose to stay in New York. She moved into the loft on Doyers Street. The radical feminist Redstocking group held a few meetings there, though Sugiura herself was never a fully committed member, and for a time weekly dance parties took place downstairs at Randall Arabie’s place. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, while she was involved with, and briefly married to, the artist John Duff, Sugiura moved into Duff's loft in the same building. But she kept her own place as a studio, and when the relationship had run its course, she moved back downstairs.

It was on Doyers Street that Sugiura hit on what she called “photopaintings,” an extraordinary series of photocanvas works juxtaposed with acrylic paintings. “Christie Street,” 1976, is even simpler than “1 Min.” Horizontal gray and white stripes on the left meet columns of black windows on the right, with only the top of a passing pedestrian’s head to cue the viewer that she’s looking at a real building. The fact that the work occupies two adjacent canvases might even pass without notice. But then color comes in -- in “Yellow Floor,” for example, a dense gray image of a scarred wooden floor is placed next to a bright yellow canvas -- and sizes change. In “Market Front,” 1978, a photo of a metal loading-dock door meets a scratchy, intense teal monochrome, and the smaller size of the painting paradoxically balances the graytone complexity of the photograph. And finally Sugiura began surrounding these diptychs and polyptychs with custom-built, deliberately incomplete wooden frames, as in “High Rise,” 1979, whose two dark canvases -- a long one painted black, and a shorter one printed with the swift, receding wall of a skyscraper -- hang like Japanese curtains inside an uneven-legged post and lintel.

Adding distinctions of color and size significantly amplifies the already buoyant vertigo of “1 Min:” the same melding and switching of opposites takes place with deeper ramifications and at a larger scale. Being placed on a par with acrylic paint makes the photo emulsion look grittier and more substantial, while the emulsion, in turn, makes the paint, however roughly applied, look comparatively slick and clean. Black and white looks richer next to color, and color bolder and more daring next to black and white. Figurative imagery lends complexity to monochrome, encouraging the eye to find its variation and detail, while the monochromes make Sugiura’s Lower Manhattan vistas even more haunting. (It’s hard not to think of Buddhist images of the world as a house on fire.) Most distinctively, perhaps, Sugiura’s use of incomplete wooden frames that extend past the corners of her canvases brings in the traditional Japanese regard for empty space: Even as a given photo and painting oppose and complement each other, Sugiura is balancing them both against the empty gallery wall.

The photo paintings are also among the best surviving documents of 1970s New York and the particular downtown scene they emerged from. They aestheticize and slightly abstract the visions and textures of Sugiura’s adopted home, depicting them both as they were and as she experienced them, as half-forsaken relics of industry and as monuments whose glamour draw pilgrims from around the world. Their eye-catching empty space comes out of wabi-sabi, but it also recapitulates the beautiful way that New York’s skyline cuts narrow rectangles into its sky.

In the early 1980s, Sugiura began making photograms, luscious, deathly images of cut flowers arranged in still lifes, repeated in series, or toned into otherworldly color. Later she would use larger sheets of paper to make deceptively simple and spontaneous-looking photograms of artists she knew, or approached, and then of subjects further afield. (She called the series “Artists and Scientists.”) Carolee Schneemann appeared in devil horns and Dr. James Watson holding large models of DNA helices; a stand-in for the artist Atsuko Tanaka held a string of lights in homage to her famous electric dress.

The problem was always to make the process new, to avoid mindless repetition. She added photograms of a couple making love to her photogram series, and spread photo paper on the floor to capture images of kittens at night. She arranged rosebuds in the hexagrams of the I Ching, used the resulting photograms to make positives, and arranged the 128 pieces thus produced in an enormous circle on the wall. She printed found X-rays on canvas and alternated them with small monochromes. Recently she’s begun another series that she wouldn't show me. By the time she's ready to share that work, she’ll be on to something else.

Back in the 1970s, Dick Bellamy also took Sugiura out to hear Lamonte Young and introduced her to the conceptual artist Walter de Maria, with whom she was involved, off and on, for years. When she was chosen for MoMA’s New Photography show in 1997, along with Rineke Dijkstra, Vik Muniz, and An-My Lê, it was De Maria who encouraged her to hang around the show watching people look at her work. (One can only speculate about what he meant by telling her, “This will never happen again.”) She went four or five times. She was also an avid visitor of other people’s shows, and for two decades she reviewed them for the prestigious Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo. And that wasn't the only Japanese connection she maintained; in fact, even while making a life in New York, she enjoyed a successful career in Tokyo, showing regularly with Zeit-FOTO and Taka Ishii Gallery.

After the MoMA show, Sugiura’s work began selling and she could finally, in her 50s, give up day jobs. (In 1996, she began a decades-long relationship with Leslie Tonkonow; currently she shows with Alison Bradley Projects.) But the Doyers Street studio, a long, sparsely furnished space up three unusually long flights of steps, remains largely the same. The floors are scratched; there’s an unfurnished futon near the front windows for naps. When a writer comes to visit, she clears off a scarred and stained table, offers him tea, and talks for an hour or two; then she goes back to work.