By Max Blue, September 10, 2025
The first US survey of Kunié Sugiura’s photo-based artwork, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 14, is a revelation. “Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting” shares a title with one of the artist’s most prominent series but aptly encompasses the entirety of her practice. A progenitor of process-based work, Sugiura’s career-long negotiation of the traditions of photography and painting has resulted in a symbiotic hybrid of the two forms. When is a photograph not a photograph? How far can the definition stretch?
The earliest work on view is the series “CKO,” made while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s. The small prints are distorted color nudes, clearly inspired by the work of British photographer Bill Brandt. The female form cuts a surreal figure in these fisheye shots, a few also featuring superimposed grid patterns that presuppose a career-long interest in blending photography with painting.
The “Photocanvas” (1975–1980) series, Sugiura’s first major body of work after graduating from art school, is in some ways her most materially experimental, blending photography and painting techniques to near-indistinguishable results. Shots of simple, natural subjects – leaves, rocks – are printed on emulsion-coated canvas. Like the finest Old Master landscapes, the chiaroscuro of “Ivy at Princeton” (1969) creates the effect of being lit from within, while the topographic stone surface in “Central Park 3” (1971) possesses all the depth of the thick impasto surface one might witness in a Jay DeFeo painting. Here, Sugiura has reversed and reframed the camera’s origin as a tool for drawing and painting, exposing how elements of painting might elevate a photograph.
To solidify the veracity of Sugiura’s experimentation, some of the Photocanvases were exhibited in painting exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 1972 (then called the Whitney Museum’s Exhibition of Contemporary Painting). A period followed during which she made traditional paintings, before once again merging the two mediums. Influenced by Warhol and Rauschenberg, the reprisal of photography in Sugiura’s work found her balancing photographs against paintings in raw, tense assemblages.
The photographic elements of Sugiura’s “Photopaintings” often show an urban environment, affixed inside bespoke wooden frames alongside modestly sized color field paintings. The innovation here is not only the dynamism brought about by these diptychs, but also the sculptural element of assemblage, bringing photographs into three dimensions. “Deadend Street” (1978) features a gap of empty space in the center of the composition, creating a structural mimesis of the long alleyway pictured in the two photographs abutting black canvases, eliciting a sense of tunneling through the artwork. The wooden element is not only sculptural but draftsman-like, as in “Boquet” (1979), in which the extended frame adds another line of movement to a photo of a bundle of sticks on a wood floor, lines veering off in every direction adjacent to a grounding dark green canvas. The wooden frames of “Highrise” and “Highrise (Red)” (both 1977) – pictures of buildings abutting narrow black and red canvases – are missing their bottom sills, giving them a feeling of freefall indicative of the vertigo induced by an urban sublime. There’s a sense of discord here that doesn’t show up in the Photocanvases – a middle passage in artistic development marked by relentless experimentation with frenetic results.
Sugiura’s later work continues her formal experimentations but feels more settled. Near life-sized photograph portraits from the late 1990s and early 2000s document her peer circle from Daido Moriyama to Yayoi Kusama and Jasper Johns. The “X-Rays” series (1993-2021) finds the artist getting under the skin and returning to sculpture. “Racks” (1994) is made up of postcard racks holding small photographic prints of x-rays, the form mimicking a skeleton. The aptly named “Vertebra” (2021) is an alternating grid of spinal x-rays and color field canvases. The standout, though, is “Premonition by Roses” (1997) a 10-foot circular arrangement of contact prints of roses. These works find Sugiura continuing to negotiate the relationship between photography and other artforms with tighter focus and quieter resonance.
The works in “Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting” command us to think about photographs not as an end in themselves but as one element contributing to a greater whole. This is truer to how photographs are lived and experienced, not as discrete objects but within a broader context. Sugiura introduced a new level of dimensionality. By expanding the definition of photography, Sugiura deepened her ability to evoke her subjects – not only to capture an image but to convey a feeling of them.
Max Blue is the art critic for the San Francisco Examiner and has contributed to Artsy, BOMB and Hyperallergic, among others. His short fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin and North Dakota Quarterly, among others.
KUNIÉ SUGIURA "After Electric Dress" 2001-2002.
KUNIÉ SUGIURA "Attractants Positive", 1995.
KUNIÉ SUGIURA "Deadend Street", 1978.
KUNIÉ SUGIURA "Sidewalk Palms", 1980.
KUNIÉ SUGIURA "Threading Hands Positive",1994.