Shadow play: in her layered, time-based photograms and other cameraless images of flowers, animals and people, Kunie Sugiura explores stasis and movement, order and chance

Art in America, April, 2002 by Janet Koplos

A mottled blue and white background suggests sky and clouds in the three Hoppings prints included in the show (all 1996). Frogs, whether sitting or jumping, seem to be airborne in that sky. These works are positives, so the amphibians are sharp, black silhouettes. Squids and Sea Creatures (both 1990) render their subjects in negative, while the background is a shadowy mixture of sepia tones; the shadows make a fluid abstraction that could almost be a painted composition.

A 1994 installation called Namu (Catfish) consists of three large photograms of fish and, in the middle of the room, a 40-by-30-by-13-inch Plexiglas tank filled with water tinted a tropical blue (sans catfish). The negative-image fish in each print seems dreamlike as it swims against an expressionistic background that could be a roiling sea or, again, a sky--this time a stormy one. The pale catfish looks like a magical creature escaped from its tank to swim through the air.

People

In the mid-'90s, Sugiura started to explore the human body. At first, she collaged film negatives or X-rays. She titled a fishlike image incorporating a human spine Patient Zero (1993); other humanoid configurations were Cranium Tree (1992) and Bowel Man (1994). But not until 1999 did she make photograms of living people. Bill Arning, in his essay for the catalogue of the traveling show, says that in these works she is not making photograms but fixing shadows. It is a small but valid distinction, for the people do not touch the photo paper, only their shadows do.

The inspiration for the new series was Sugiura's acquaintance with Ushio Shinohara, another Japanese expatriate in New York who, as a young avant-garde artist in Tokyo in 1958, had staged a "boxing painting" performance. He did it again for her. In silhouette, the boxer punches a suspended five-gallon paint bucket and spatters dark matter across a grid of four large sheets of photo paper in the most spectacular images from this series (The Boxing Papers, Shinohara A Positive and B Positive). In the exhibition, there are also several other images of pairs of boxers, both male and female, positive and negative. These do not include paint, but some show minor spatters--sweat rather than blood, one hopes.

In her recent show at Leslie Tonkonow, titled "The Artist Papers," the Shinohara series was shown again, along with images of other artists, all of whom are identified in the titles of the works. A double portrait presents the distinctive silhouette of the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner--beard, hair knot and all--his lanky form in motion writing a formula in one image and a sort of arabesque in the other. Both inscriptions appear to hang in the air, appropriately representing products of his mind. Another portrait, again exhibited in both positive and negative, silhouettes the head and shoulders of a stocky man with a slightly hunched posture. His profile might seem vaguely familiar, but he probably would not be readily identifiable if he were not accompanied by the motif of a hand seemingly dragged through paint--Jasper Johns's most familiar "self-portrait" sign in his own work.