Longstanding friendships among artists are precious things. One gets to inhale the work slowly, over decades. I’ve known Kunié Sugiura since the late 1990s, and she is one of my closest neighbors. I’ve spent many hours in her live/work loft, notable for its emphasis on work and not comfort, a throwback to a time when artists’ spaces did not feature in The New York Times real estate section. She invited me to do this interview on the eve of Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, her first extensive museum show in the United States, at the age of eighty-two (grumble). Our conversation afforded the opportunity to spend several days talking about her life and practice. As an interviewee she is, like her work, generous and playful, answering certain questions, jumping over others.
Kunié’s work puzzles the media it utilizes. By introducing a disruptive wash of water midway through the developing process, or by patchily applying liquid emulsion to print images on canvas, she mines the chemical and light-based properties of photography for the liminal effects of a medium both handmade and machine aided. Her monochrome paintings—acrylic absorbed into raw canvas—are always presented next to and in relation to her photographs, upending the hierarchy between these two-dimensional formats. Photography, that degraded and “popular” medium, is smuggled into the vaunted realm of painting, and her monochrome rectangles function not as the protagonists of the work but rather as straight man, as foil. As well, she doesn’t hold to the typical privileging of particular living forms, rather approaching each in her work—flower, kitten, and human alike—with the same cool curiosity. In this way I find her work prescient. Tightly controlled and then not, her sixty-year practice is experimental, in senses scientific and aesthetic.
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