Kunié Sugiura's groundbreaking art gets long-overdue spotlight at SFMOMA

San Francisco Chronicle​

08-06-2025

During a recent morning stroll through her new solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Japanese artist Kunié Sugiura paused in front of a wall-size photo of herself that was taken 53 years ago in a New York gallery.
'I don't even know who she is,' said the 82-year-old photographer with a smile, looking bemused at the image of her younger self.
In the 1972 photo, Sugiura stands in front of one of her early photocanvases, one similar to those on view in the SFMOMA survey exhibition 'Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting.' It's a semi-abstract photograph of a detail from nature, maybe beach sand, ash or a Central Park stone, which she blew up and then printed by hand on photosensitized canvas, applying graphite to accentuate contrast.
The result, like much of Sugiura's work from the 1970s on, looks surprisingly contemporary. She started creating hybrid work that played with the boundaries between photography and painting years before it was popular, and yet Sugiura has only recently received the attention from museums and collectors that she deserves.
Just last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought two of her photopaintings, and the SFMOMA acquired two of the standout images in its exhibition — her 1969 photocanvas 'Yellow Mum,' the cover image of the exhibition's accompanying catalog, published by MACK; and 'Deadend Street' (1978), a sculptural photopainting that juxtaposes a gritty street in Queens, N.Y., with monochromatic black painted panels, divided in the center by empty space.
'Kunié started making color photographs as art at a time when pretty much nobody else was,' explained Erin O'Toole, who curated the SFMOMA show and serves as head of photography at the museum. 'I think that's likely why her work took some time to get attention, because people didn't quite know what to make of it.'
O'Toole went on to explain that there was a perceived divide in the art world well into the 1970s between painting, deemed expressive, and photography, regarded as more formal and purely representational — 'Kunié insisted on blurring that boundary.'
Unlike the young black-haired artist who exudes tough-girl cool in the 1972 photo, with her arms crossed and her thumbs looped in her bell-bottoms, Sugiura today is calm and cheerful. She said it was gratifying to see more than 60 works from her six decades of artistic experimentationon view together.
Touring the newly installed show prompted her to recall positive memories and fruitful, collaborative friendships – like with 94-year-old artist Ushio Shinohara, who's depicted splattering paint with boxing gloves in one of her bold photograms from 1999.
'People might not know this about me, but my life has been the best of the best,' Sugiura said. 'I'm happy I've found a way of life and of working that's stayed interesting for so long.'
The SFMOMA exhibition dedicates a room to each chronologically distinct phase in Sugiura's career, spanning from the 1960s to 2021, featuring photocanvases, photopaintings, photograms and x-rays.
'I couldn't believe that her work had never been the subject of a major exhibition in the U.S.,' said O'Toole, who started planning the SFMOMA show after visiting Sugiura in her New York studio three years ago. 'I could already envision how dynamic an exhibition of the full arc of her career could be.'
Sugiura was born in Nagoya, Japan, at the height of World War II. Before she turned 2, her father was killed in a U.S. military bombing of the munitions factory where he worked. She showed artistic ability as well as scientific promise from a young age, and enrolled in a women's university in Tokyo to study physics before making the radical decision to apply to art school in the United States.
In 1967, just a few days after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she had been influenced by conceptual photographer Ken Josephson, Sugiura moved to New York and began her ongoing exploration into new ways to approach photography.
Her early experimentations involved coating large sheets of canvas with liquid photo emulsion, also called 'liquid light,' which created unique and surprising results. Working at home and at a large scale, she had to use her bathroom as a darkroom and would wash the massive canvases in her tub, wearing a swimsuit to avoid ruining her clothes.
She recalled feeling 'very happy' with the results, and it allowed her to marry her science background with creative darkroom improvisation.
'I think like an Impressionist painter,' said Sugiura, 'but I was glad that I didn't have to just do painting because I was very frustrated by it. I also didn't want to just create simple black and whites (with a camera). I saw possibilities in making large images on canvas, a material people assume is for painting.'
Her best photopaintings, like 'Deadend Street' (1978), marry Sugiura's eye for natural or architectural detail with an urban sophistication. Unlike Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom she cites as influences, she used her own photos, rather than screenprinting mass-media images.
Stuck at home during the COVID pandemic, Sugiura revisited her anatomical x-ray series, which she had begun 30 years earlier. During a 1990 hospitalization for a collapsed lung, she became fascinated with the mysterious, anonymous beauty of x-rays which were then printed on thick film stock.
'When I was in the hospital, every four hours they were taking x-rays,' she recalled. 'I said, 'I want to see what you are looking at. I think I could do something very interesting with these images.''
The doctors agreed to give her other patients' discarded films, as long as she blacked out their names (which would surely be a HIPAA violation today). She amassed a sizable collection and created a series of haunting, surprisingly beautiful images.
'X-rays are innocent of gender. Man or woman, we all have the same structure. I might be weird, but I find that beautiful,' she said, standing in front of her large 2021 work 'Vertebra,' a massive grid of spinal column x-rays connected by colorful, interchangeable painted panels.
Sugiura said she still makes art almost daily in the same fourth-floor Chinatown loft she's lived and worked in since 1974.
'I used to try to separate living and working, but the whole place is now a place for work,' she said. 'I work every day as much as I can, and I love it.'