Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present Boundaries and coexistence, an exhibition of works by Kunié Sugiura, from Saturday, July 19 to Saturday, August 23, 2025. 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), will be 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 will be 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 and 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.