TOKYO.- Taka Ishii Gallery is presenting “Boundaries and Coexistence”, an exhibition of works by Kunié Sugiura. Known for her fluid movement across multiple media, Sugiura resists framing contrasts—between Japan and the US, nature and artificiality, painting and photography—as binary opposites. Instead, she allows them to coexist in a state of tension, articulating her bicultural identity with both subtlety and clarity. Her practice positions photography as an art form as flexible and expressive as painting or sculpture. Spanning two venues, in Roppongi and Kyobashi, the exhibition traces the arc of Sugiura’s decades-long career.

At the Roppongi venue, her Cko series (1966–1967), produced while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), is being exhibited. This early body of work, a milestone marking the beginning of her exploration, emerged from her experience of isolation and alienation in a foreign culture. Using a fisheye lens to photograph nude models and layering color and black-and-white negatives, she distorted and recombined the images to striking effect. The series is also characterized by technical experimentation merging controlled manipulation with unpredictability, such as solarization and brushing negatives with bleach. The desire to transcend boundaries between media, later evident in her photo paintings, photograms, and X-ray photographs, has already emerged here. Shown alongside Cko is “Untitled 3” (1970) from the Photocanvas series (1968-1972), in which black-and-white photographs are printed onto canvas coated with photographic emulsion and developed, fixed, and washed by the artist, then further altered with acrylic graphite, synthesizing photographic and painterly elements. Also on view are the recent works “Fever” (2021), “Nina’s Pelvis & Leg” (2024) and “Oral” (2022), which incorporate her X-ray photography from the 1990s and 2000s. Using medical imaging negatives, Sugiura cuts and assembles fragments of varied origin into visually arresting compositions. These works explore the boundary between visual art and science, poetically and symbolically rendering the internal structure of the human body and powerfully evoking the mystery and fragility of life.

At the Kyobashi venue, the focus is on Sugiura’s photograms, which she has continued to produce since 1980. Using shadows to trace the contours and movements of living forms such as flowers, animals, small organisms, and human silhouettes, particularly “The Kitten Papers” (1992), which imbues nocturnal kittens with pulsating movement. The presences evoked by contrasting light and shadow resonate with the Japanese aesthetics of fragility and ephemerality, reflecting Sugiura’s distinctive fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities. “Attenuated Head” (1986) is one of her early photograms, using sprinkled sand to represent an elongated head. She used many different materials to depict heads and bodies, and began incorporating abstract forms during the early 1980s. From 1989 onward, flowers were frequent subjects, and the Botanicas, Cut Flowers, and Stacks series followed. These appeared side by side in this exhibition.

Throughout her career, Sugiura has quietly yet consistently challenged the conventions of photography, painting, and art itself. Her work does not assert itself loudly but contains a deep internal balance of harmony and tension through which she has shaped an inimitable artistic vision. Expanding the expressive possibilities of photography, She has opened up a new territory in visual art, gently inviting us on a journey into such essential themes as light and shadow, presence and absence, and the meeting of science and art.

Kunié Sugiura was born in Nagoya and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1967. At SAIC, Sugiura studied under the conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson; after almost 50 years, she continues to explore a diverse range of photographic expressions. Through her works, she captures light, time, the transience of nature and its memory. The result is an almost contradictory work that harnesses tensions between the concrete and the abstract, while also standing between the improvised and the constructed. Sugiura’s major solo exhibitions include “Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting”, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2025); “SUGIURA Kunié: Aspiring Experiments / New York in 50 years”, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2018): “Time Emit”, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit (2008) and “Dark Matters / Light Affairs”, The University of California, Davis (2001). She has received the Higashikawa Prize (2007) and the Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts (1998). Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.