Hiroshi Sugimoto, the renowned photographer, architect, and conceptual artist has a new show, Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form, that just opened at Lisson Gallery LA, on view through January 11, 2025, exhibiting for the first time in North America, his work, Brush Impression, Heart Sutra (2023), accompanied by a selection of images from his Sea of Buddha series.

The Heart Sutra is a Buddhist prayer. At Lisson Gallery Los Angeles, this unique artwork is presented on a specially built tall wooden curved on which 288 one-of-a-kind gelatin prints of Japanese Kanji characters have been placed in the order they appear as part of the text.

Sugimoto-san, at the press preview for the exhibition, explained that to make these works, he stood in his darkroom with the lights off, using photo paper that was past its expiration date, he dipped a brush into his fixer and drew a different Japanese character on each paper. Then he would turn the light on – exposing the photo paper, with the result that the paper turned black, while where he applied the fixer remained white. During the pandemic he worked on his calligraphy until he could make the characters to his satisfaction, The end results looks like Sugimoto painted the characters but actually he created a camera-less one-of-a-kind photo. He then assembled the 228 images to read from top to bottom, right to left. Sugimoto considers this all one artwork.

Standing in the center of this work is a contemplative spiritual experience. At Lisson this is enhanced by the display around the same room of seven works from Sugimoto’s Sea of Buddha series. There is a temple in Kyoto, Japan, that houses 1000 Buddhas. Sugimoto took photos of groupings of them, using only natural light, each a different set of Buddhas, in a way that makes them seem like the same image is repeated, but they are unique. In this way, Sugimoto celebrates the traditional, while making it modern.

The exhibition also features one of Sugimoto’s sculptures, which he calls a ready-made, because it is based on a 19th Century mathematical formula, Kuen’s Surface, which Sugimoto has made into a stainless-steel form that strives to reach infinity even as its aspect changes depending on the angle you are looking at it.

In each of these works, Sugimoto expresses his lifelong existential investigation of permanence and impermanence, of what is and is not real, of form and emptiness, and in doing so his works of art capturie the unimaginable and the unseen.