“Before you try to become an artist I want you to go out to the world and learn about it.” In this video, the highly acclaimed Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto advises aspiring artists to expose themselves to many different jobs and experiences before venturing into art, which he feels requires “a profound experience in life.”
If you, after you’ve experienced many kinds of jobs, still desire to become an artist, then you should go for it. Sugimoto emphasizes that you don’t have to be an artist when you are in your teens or twenties, but can just as well start at the age of 70 or even 80: “It’s better for one to go on a journey, which can improve oneself, before trying to become an artist.” Referring to French artist Marcel Duchamp’s idea that all the greatest artist are bad people, Sugimoto also finds that people who become successful in the art world are often strange: “Because artists see the world in a way that a normal person wouldn’t. So if you think you are a good person, then you are not the artist type.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is a Japanese artist and photographer. Sugimoto is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2001), the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting (2009) and The Royal Photographic Society, Centenary Medal (2017). In 2006, he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Sugimoto has had solo exhibitions at prominent venues such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Osaka, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His works are presently held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu in Japan. Sugimoto lives and works between New York City and Tokyo. For more see: https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/
Hiroshi Sugimoto was interviewed at the Enoura Observatory in Odawara, Japan by Haruko Hoyle in June 2018.
Camera: Yudai Maruyama
Edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Produced by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and Kasper Bech Dyg
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2018
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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