Tokihiro Sato

Tokihiro Sato is widely recognized as one of Japan’s most accomplished and well respected artists working in the photographic medium. Originally trained as a sculptor, he turned to photography in the late 1980s to explore his ideas with regard to light and space. His fascination with tempo­rality is directly seen in his “breath graphs” or “photo respi­ration,” where tiny points of light or illuminated lines record his movements through space. Using an 8 x 10-inch cam­era fitted with a darkening filter, Sato’s lengthy exposures – lasting from one to three hours – provide the opportunity for him to occupy the landscape. When shooting in daylight, he flashes a mirror at the sun, reflecting its light into the camera lens. For nocturnal or interior views he “draws” with a small flashlight. The result¬ing photographs exquisitely depict detailed scenes punctu¬ated by tiny pinpoints of light that track Sato’s movement, but not his physical form.

 

Tokihiro Sato was born in 1957 in Sakata, Yamagata Pre¬fecture, in northern Honshu, Japan. He earned de­grees in Sculpture from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he now works as a professor. His work is held in nu¬merous public and private collec­tions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art and Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo. Over the past decade, his work has been showcased in solo exhibi­tions at institutions such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville.