Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948 and moved to the United States in 1970, settling in New York in 1974.
Hiroshi Sugimoto has been described as the "Last Modernist". His artistic practice encompasses photography, painting, installation, architecture and performance art. Black-and-white photography is the most iconic art form. For Hiroshi Sugimoto, the camera is the bridge to the memory of the world and as the medium to explore the art, history, science and religion of East and West. Normally he works with traditional large format cameras, storing time in his artwork with long exposures, capturing timeless landscapes and infinite memories of time with restricted lenses. Driven by the infinite fascination with time, the photographs of Sugimoto are as groundbreaking artworks to cross-disciplinary contemporary artworks, pushing the boundaries of photography, painting, installation and architectural art.
The works of Hiroshi Sugimoto always touch upon the inital and most impressive questions about the world in the viewer's mind, bringing the viewer into the surreal space created by flat images, and engaging the thoughts of each viewer. In the Seascapes series, for example, Sugimoto adopted the most basic dichotomous composition for photographing the sky and the sea. Some of these works show a line between sea and sky and some of them blur the line because of the water vapour, which reminds us of the famous Zen saying: "It's water. It's not only water. It's just water." It is also as Hiroshi Sugimoto says: "I wonder if there really is a world for everyone, if there really is a world, as I see it."