Checklist of the ExhibitionDimensions are in inches; height precedes width.

Fig. 2. #276 Koto-ku Aomi, 1996

Cover: Shirakami #9, 2008

919 BroadwayNashville, TN 37203www.fristcenter.org

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by: PRESENCE OR ABSENCEThe Photographs of Tokihiro Sato

1. Gleaning Light (Favorite Place 2), 2005. C-print photograph, 40 x 50 in. Collection of Brenda Edelson

2. Gleaning Light (The Ravine), 2005. 24 Type C prints, each 14 x 11 in., 45 3/4 x 98 1/4 in. overallCourtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

3. Gleaning Light (The Site), 200524 Type C prints, each 14 x 11 in., 45 3/4 x 98 1/4 in. overallCourtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

4. Gleaning Light (To and From 2), 2005Type C print, 40 x 50 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

5. #346 Hattachi, 1998Gelatin silver print, 18 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

6. #276 Koto-ku Aomi, 1996Gelatin silver print, 96 x 120 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

7. #374 Sakatashibi 2, 1999Gelatin silver print, 38 x 38 in. The West Collection

8. #2 Shirakami, 2008Gelatin silver print, 48 x 38 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

9. #8 Shirakami, 2008Gelatin silver print, 60 x 50 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

10. #9 Shirakami, 2008Gelatin silver print, 60 x 50 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

11. #340 Yura, 1998Gelatin silver print, 19 7/8 x 23 7/8 in.Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York

12. #388 Yura, 1999Light panel (transparency), 39 x 48 x 5 1/2 in.Private Collection, New York

Gordon Contemporary Artists Project GalleryJune 18–September 12, 2010Organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts© Frist Center for the Visual Arts

2010 Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery Exhibition Sponsor:

Welling LaGrone and Morgan Keegan

The use of light to mark the intersec-tion of time, space, and the movement of the body is a consistent motif in Japanese artist Tokihiro Sato’s land-scape photographs. While his im-ages seem surreal in their eerie and implausible content, they are not digital fabrications or the results of darkroom manipulations. Instead, they are directly made with a traditional eight-by-ten-inch camera on a tripod. The artist positions the camera, sets a long exposure—often from one to three hours so that anything moving (other than a strong light) is not captured on film—then walks or swims across its field of view with mirrors during the day or flashlights at night, pausing at intervals

to direct or reflect light toward the camera lens. Sato checks his loca-tion and the angle of light in a large mirror mounted around the camera, which allows him to compose as he moves through the view. The result-ing spots and trails of light become photographic indices of the otherwise invisible artist. They are quite literally “drawings in light.”

Paradox and multiple meanings abound in Sato’s works. The photog-rapher is both the recording eye and

the subject that actively animates the scene—he simultaneously observes and performs. The relationship between subjectivity and objectivity reinforces the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s obser-vation that the photographed view can “point two ways … to perceive the world is to co-perceive oneself.”1

The artist does not have to be in two places at once—time elapses from the moment he sets up the shot to the completion of the process—but since the photograph compresses hours into an apparent, single instant, the viewer takes in multiple perspectives simul-taneously. Since Cubism, the unfixed position of the artist as viewer and

subject has often been posed as just this sort of dance between perspec-tives—being one place and another at the same time, a moving eye watch-ing a subject as it moves, creating a dynamic relationship between artist, viewer, and subject.

This contemplation on the refractions of space and self will not likely distract the viewer from the more fundamental question: “What am I looking at?” The spots and trails of light trigger many associations, particularly with rhythms

and distributions seen in both the natural and urban environments. In Sato’s misty seascapes, hovering orbs suggest networks of lights from gravity-defying ships, buoys, or lighthouses; in his Shirakami series (see cover), fireflies seem to be clustered near trees in the forest. In the more urban set-ting of #276 Koto-ku Aomi (fig. 2), a tangle of light-trails suggests hordes of luminous commuters oozing their way through the empty street like electric lava.

If symbolic associations arise from these traces of light, messages are also conveyed by the photographs’ locations. Steeped in portent, the landscapes and seascapes on which Sato stages his light drawings are often empty, primal, and ethereal. The scene in #388 Yura, showing dense fog penetrated by baroquely pocked volcanic rocks, could have been unchanged for millions of years. This place seems to be not just outside of time, but also beyond our capacity to visit to see for ourselves—it could be a dream of Jupiter. Such a fantastic quality remains even when there is an archaeological dimension to the landscape, as in #340 Yura (fig. 1), which shows piles of cubed concrete that people have placed in the water to form protective barriers against erosion. One can imagine these as naturally occurring crystalline deposits, formed from elements and through pro-cesses that remain outside of human-ity’s ken. Even Sato’s black and white depictions of cities seem to show a post- or non-human world that is eerily unpopulated save for spectral entities floating and zigzagging through the wide streets and public squares—zips of pure energy and hints of a post-apocalyptic imagination.

As Sato shows, the camera’s ability to generate a sense of the uncanny through rational, mechanical means makes it a useful tool for artists who possess romantic compulsions to penetrate the appearances of this world to unveil another reality and to

produce illusions of mystery that are effective because of the frequently held notion that the camera does not lie. This provokes the viewer into making interpretive projections based on what he or she might desire to see:

to the spiritual-minded, the lights may be the souls of the dead; to the child, they may be will-o’-the-wisps or fairies; to the fan of science fiction, they may be flecks of disembodied conscious-ness descending from a higher plane.

Sato disclaims any intention of implying a world other than our own, but does acknowledge the power of light to act as a symbol for spirituality. He says “I don’t think about my art in a ‘spiri-tual’ context. However, it is a fact that light evokes such connotations. Also, my own activity involves monotonous repetition such as breathing, which in itself might be a spiritual world.”2 As Sato exerts himself while crossing the field of view, he becomes aware that his own breath, like light, is an ephem-eral marker of life and the passage of time. Describing his pictures as “breath-graphs,” Sato says “There is a direct connection between my breath and the act of tracing out the light.”3

Given his interest in defining space through the intervention of the body,

it is perhaps not surprising that Sato studied sculpture at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. It may be more surprising that his great-est influence is not Japanese, but is Robert Smithson (1938–1973), the

American Minimalist land artist best known for his monumental Spiral Jetty (fig. 3), a nebula formed of stone jutting out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Much of Smithson’s work em-phasizes the temporal nature of humanity’s relationship with the landscape, often signified by his use of mirrors in indoor and outdoor installations. In describing several of his mirrored works, Smithson anticipates the effects of Sato’s photographs:

“Space” is permut[at]ed into a multiplicity of directions. One becomes conscious of space attenuated in the form of elusive flat planes. The space is both crystalline and collapsible…. Vanishing points are deliberately inverted in order to increase one’s awareness of total artifice. The commonplace is transformed into a labyrinth of non-objective abstractions.4

While Sato consid-ers his explora-tions of perception to belong to this modern context, and he is not in any way religious,5 his imagery and ideas often appear to coincide with certain cultural manifestations of Taoism and Buddhism. His simple organic forms and limpid atmospheres bring to mind the meditative arenas of rock gardens,

temple architecture, and Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings (see fig.4), echoing Andrew Juniper’s observation that “Space and the discipline required to maintain it is a key aspect of Japanese aesthetic ideals.”6 As is expressed in the invisible movement of Sato through the cam-era’s field of view, Buddhist landscape imagery frequently features the theme of the wanderer—a monk, fool, or sage—who moves freely through time and space seeking enlightenment by losing socially wrought conceptions of self. Juniper notes that in Japanese tradition, the artist’s task is to humbly “subdue the ego so that mind and body can work in a free, natural, and uninhibited way.”7 A similar quality of ego erasure is implied by Sato’s state-ment that although there is an aspect of self-portraiture in his work, “I want to express universal existence by the fact that I myself do not appear in any of my photographs.”8

The art historian Joseph D. Parker discusses Buddhism’s interest in show-ing that the “true and artificial” are not opposites, but are “meaningful only in non-dualistic, intimate relation to each other.”9 This idea reverberates in Sato’s

works, which break down boundaries between here and there, concept and physicality, reality and illusion. Many of his images could conceivably function as illustrations of the thirteenth-century monk Chung Fen’s idea that “What is revealed by the clear water is the essence of illusion, what is reflected by

the bright mirror is the traces of illusion. When illusion is extinguished and awakening reaches emptiness, this is the supreme height of transcendental awareness …”10

Sato’s recent works seem more re-moved from traditional aesthetics, yet in them the artist continues to employ early photographic technology to pursue his interests in non-dualistic, non-linear perceptions and the tem-poral reconstruction of space. He built his own pinhole camera following the centuries-old principles of the camera obscura, in which light enters through a tiny opening into a dark space and projects an inverted image of the exterior onto the interior’s walls or, in modern times, an emulsified surface. The pinhole camera features as many as twenty-four apertures facing in different directions, enabling him to capture the landscape and cityscape as an intersecting overlap of viewing angles (fig. 6). This can yield simple binocular views when the aperture faces in only two directions: up and down, or east and west. Or it can be complex, dynamic, and spatially disori-enting, as in Gleaning Light: The Ra-vine (fig. 5), a twenty-four panel view

of Manhattan showing tall buildings photographed at different angles of projection, then aligned contiguously to suggest a whole that is defined by twenty-four separate perspectives. Through its title, the Gleaning Light series reveals Sato’s intention of being a harvester of the ephemeral; just as his earlier works reinforced the sense of the landscape’s impermanence, the pinhole photographs propose that the city’s apparent stability is equally illusory.

Throughout his work, Sato encourages the viewer to rethink the relationship between the eye and the mind—since reason is tied to vision, he seems to ask, if we see something impossible that is not an obvious sleight-of-hand, do we trust the photograph or our eyes? Or do we take a third path, widening our sense of what is possible, acknowledging that reason and vision are not as close as we thought, while mechanics and imagination are not as far apart?

Mark ScalaChief Curator

Notes:1. Patrick Maynard, “Scales of Space and Time in Photogra-phy,” in Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 190.2. Elizabeth Siegel, Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Photographs (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2005), 31.3. Ibid., 30.4. From “Unpublished Writings” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Text available at http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/short.htm. 5. Susan Edwards, notes from a conversation with the artist, May 10, 2009.6. Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Imperma-nence, (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2003), 116.7. Ibid., 91.8. Seigel, 31.9. Joseph D. Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 163.10. Parker, 199.

PRESENCE OR ABSENCE: The Photographs of Tokihiro Sato

Fig. 5. Gleaning Light (The Ravine), 2005

Fig. 1. #340 Yura, 1998

Fig. 3. Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, 1970. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, and water

coil, 1500 x 15 ft. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson /

licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

Fig. 4. Kano Tanyu. The Four Seasons, 1668. Six-fold screen; ink and slight color on paper, 68 1/2 x 150 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Maud Eells Corning 1992.394.1

Fig. 6. Camera Obscura Project, 2004. Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan