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This catalogue was published to accompany the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition “POST VITAM” (March 21–October 4, 2020) at the newly re-opened Kyoto City Museum of Art.

Exhibition and catalogue offer a selective but encompassing overview of the highly decorated Japanese artist’s career, whose honors include a Hasselblad Award (2011) and being named Officier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2013) and a Person of Cultural Merit (Japan, 2017).

Divided into the four chapters Plates, The Pure Land of Ruri Blue Radiance, Imayo – Poem of the Pure Land, and Kyoto and Me, “POST VITAM” introduces various facets of Sugimoto’s work as he explores concepts of time, perception, religiousness and consciousness. In addition to Sugimoto’s photographs and images, the catalogue also provides exhibition views (including shots of the several installation pieces) as well as critical commentary, including several in-depth essays and interviews, with all texts available in Japanese and English translation.

“This museum, which began life as the Kyoto Enthronement Memorial Museum of Art (in commemoration of the enthronement of Emperor Showa) in 1933, has just been redeveloped. In thinking about the theme of an exhibition to mark the renewal project’s completion, I asked myself what the most desirable kind of rebirth was. I found my answer in the yearning that people felt for the Pure Land back when the nine-story octagonal pagoda of Hos’shoji temple towered over this same Okazaki district and Emperor Shirakawa had implemented his system of cloistered rule.” — from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s foreword