Tokihiro Sato came to photography through sculpture and his approach to the medium reflects this background, with his focus on space, light and physical presence. Following his studies at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in the early 1980s, Sato began making large steel works. Feeling frustrated, however, with the limitations of these ‘hunks of iron’,¹ by 1987 he had begun to document them in photographs, using penlights, mirrors and long camera exposures to trace their presence in space over time. The success of this technique led him to abandon sculpture altogether to concentrate on photographing the spaces themselves, creating indoor and outdoor scenes filled with dots, lines and scrolls of light. The resulting images are uncanny and evocative, featuring gloomy corporate interiors and industrial landscapes reflecting Japan’s frantic construction and urban development of the late 1980s and 90s.

Sato’s first ‘Breath-graph’ works, also translated as ‘Photo-respirations’, were shot inside nondescript modernist buildings; his university campus is depicted in Breath-graph no. 21 1988. These photographs were created using a dark filter over the camera lens, with the shutter left open for three hours, while Sato used a penlight to make vertical gestures in the air as he moved through the space. The camera does not capture the movements of the artist as they are too fast — only the strokes of light penetrate the filter. Of these works, Sato has stated that light is:

. . . the source of all life and prerequisite for vision . . . in the resulting image I attempt to imprint not a visual record of the human figure but that of human presence itself.²

With the camera positioned on a staircase landing, Breath-graph no. 21 offers a complex perspective, with heavy concrete balustrades, and multiple levels and views through several layers of glass. The spectral presence of the artist, marked by calligraphic ‘breaths’ of light, is one of implied forward movement: up and down stairs, through corridors and between rooms. Breath-graph no. 22, which appears to be set in the same building, has been described as recalling the work of Italian futurists, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s seminal 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), with its shared experimentation in capturing movement and time within a still image.³ One might also think of Lee Ufan’s ‘From Line’ painting series of the 1970s and 1980s, which mark time and presence through sequences of long downward brushstrokes. Sato’s later photographs, generally taken outdoors, are less suggestive of linear movement and instead mark out fields of space and points of focus. If taken during the day, a mirror is used to reflect sunlight into the lens, resulting in spots of light floating across the landscape, whether a busy intersection in Tokyo’s Shibuya district or a construction site near an abandoned building in remote Hokkaido.

Sato’s sculptural approach to photography is also evident in the scale and materiality of his works. By using 8x10 inch negatives, he is able to blow up his images to print at an enormous size. They are then installed unframed or placed within large plexiglas boxes; he has also experimented with printing on sheets of translucent plastic suspended from the ceiling (resembling room dividers), or hung floating off the wall and backlit.

The commanding dimensions of the works intensify Tokihiro Sato’s sublime vision, which captures with haunting clarity the human influence on the Japanese landscape — not only on its continually changing built environment, but also the transient souls who occupy it.

Endnotes

1. Tokihiro Sato, quoted in Toshiaki Minemura, ‘That mysterious light’, in Sato Tokihiro: Photo-Respiration [exhibition catalogue], Gallery GAN, Tokyo, 1996, p.5.
2. Robert Stearns, Photography and Beyond in Japan: Space, Time and Memory [exhibition catalogue], Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 1995, p.75.
3. Stearns, p.75.