Hiroshi Sugimoto | Sea of Buddha

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Sea of Buddha

New York City, USA: Sonnabend Sundell Editions, 1997

24 x 15.5 cm., Leporello fold in cloth slip cover

Edition of 1000 numbered copies

Conceived in 1988 and realized in 1995, Sea of Buddha captures the serene yet subtly varied presence of the thousand-and-one twelfth century gilded statues of the Thousand-Armed Kannon Bodhisattva in the Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto, Japan. 

Inspired by Walter De Maria’s installation The Broken Kilometer [below, bottom], battled bureaucracy for seven years, before finally being allowed to document the interior of the temple. Using an 8x10 large-format camera, Sugimoto captured tightly framed rows upon rows of statues in a series of forty-eight black and white near-identical images. 

This accordion-fold artist’s book with brushed aluminum covers was released two year later, in an edition of 1000 numbered copies. 

The complete edition represents one million Bodhisattvas. 

"The New York art scene in the 1970s was dominated by minimal and conceptual art, experiments in visualizing abstract concepts. It occurred to me that similar motives inspired the making of art in twelfth-century Japan. In a Kyoto temple, there is an eight-hundred-years old installation of a thousand-and-one Senju Kanon, the "Thousand-Armed Merciful Bodhisattava Avalokitesvara" figure, which is a three-dimensional representation of the Buddhist afterlife, the Pure Land Western Paradise. After seven years of red tape, I was finally granted permission to photograph in the temple of Sanjusangendo, the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In special preparation for the shoot, I had all late-medieval and early-modern embellishments removed, and the contemporary fluorescent lighting was turned off. Stripping the temple of these additions re-created  the splendor of the thousand bodhisattvas glistening in the light of the sun rising over the Higashiyama Hills, perhaps as the Kyoto aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1185) might have seen them. Will today's conceptual art survive another eight-hundred years?"

- Hiroshi Sugimoto