Sea of Buddha

Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948)

Exploration of repetition, infinity, and time through symmetrical compositions highlighting subtle visual distinctions among Buddhist sculptures.

Description

Sea of Buddha by Hiroshi Sugimoto captures the serene yet subtly varied presence of the 1,001 gilded statues of the Thousand-Armed Kannon Bodhisattva in the Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto, Japan. Conceived in 1988 and realized in 1995, this series comprises 48 black-and-white photographs depicting near-identical compositions, inviting close inspection to discern minute visual differences.

Sugimoto's motivation for the series drew inspiration from minimalist and conceptual art—specifically Walter De Maria’s installation The Broken Kilometer, composed of 500 polished brass rods arranged in precise serial alignment—an approach that parallels Sugimoto’s interest in repetition, spatial logic, and minimal intervention. This line of inquiry connects directly to Buddhist visual traditions, where repetition and spatial ordering are employed not as decorative elements but as meditative structures that reflect impermanence, interdependence, and the cyclical nature of existence.

Using an 8x10 large-format camera, Sugimoto captured tightly framed, symmetrical compositions of rows upon rows of statues from elevated vantage points. Rather than merely documenting historical artifacts, he recreated the ambiance of the Heian period by removing modern embellishments and photographing the statues in natural dawn light, presenting the sculptures as they might have appeared 800 years earlier. When installed in gallery exhibitions that emphasise the repetition of the imagery, the photographic sequencing invites viewers into a meditative encounter with repetition and difference.

Exhibited widely, the series has appeared at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1995) and within major surveys—Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time (Mori Art Museum; Hirshhorn; de Young, 2005–07) and Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine (Hayward Gallery; UCCA; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2023–24)—with additional presentations at Pace Gallery, New York (2016) and Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art (2020). Sugimoto’s related three-channel video Accelerated Buddha (1997) is often shown in tandem, and the photographs were issued as an accordion-fold artist’s book, Sea of Buddha (1997). His broader honors include the Hasselblad Award (2001) and the Praemium Imperiale (2009).

Behind the work

It took Hiroshi Sugimoto nearly eight years of persistent negotiation—including formal petitions and personal appeals to Japanese cultural officials—before he was granted permission to photograph the interior of Kyoto’s sacred Sanjūsangen-dō temple for Sea of Buddha.

To recreate how the Buddhas might have appeared during the Heian period, Sugimoto removed all later additions to the temple and relied solely on natural dawn light, photographing during the brief midsummer moment when sunlight slipped beneath the deep eaves to illuminate the gilded Kannon statues.

Sugimoto’s video work Accelerated Buddha loops the forty-eight still images of the 1,001 Kannon statues at ever-increasing speed, transforming calm contemplation into a hypnotic blur—his way of showing what it might feel like to witness one million Buddhas in five minutes.

Quotes by the photographer

"Art is not merely imitation but a process of revealing underlying truths or questioning established beliefs."

"Many people believe that at the time of your death, 1,000 Buddhas show up and welcome you into the paradise state. This is a vision of the point of death; it's the process of dying. The Buddhist concept is that it takes 48 days to get near this state. So it's a slow process, moving into, not a permanent death, but the world of the dead."

"In 1994, I finally received permission to photograph the Sanjusangendo (Hall of Thirty-three Bays) at Myohoin Temple in Kyoto. This was after seven years of negotiations and being twice refused. I had my reasons for persisting so doggedly: I just had to see the multitude of Thousand-Armed Kannon and Twenty-eight Guardian Deities in an ideal natural light in order to re-envision how they would have looked when first enshrined there centuries ago."

"To me, as a visual artist, I don’t want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well. [I’m concerned with] aesthetics and this idea of how the passage between life and death goes. I can visually present that by borrowing this Buddhist statue."

"Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world… Photography is a system of saving memories. It’s a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time."

"I was concerned with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about."

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