Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Okayama-based artist Keita Sugiura. His second exhibition with the gallery, it will be his first in the Main Space. Sugiura makes photographs of natural landscapes in which Romantic and Minimalist impulses are given equal billing.

‘Daydream,’ the body of work on view, is a series of pictures of clouds in varying states of formation and dissolution. At first glance the entire series seems to depict an inflected field of white. However, upon closer inspection, each of the images begins to reveal its unique characteristics, an entire world of modulated forms and subtle gradations of color.

The work is defiantly meditative, insistent on observing, and capturing, moments of transience. But it is also defiant in its positioning vis-à-vis the dominant popular culture, in particular Japanese popular culture. Eschewing the bright colors, influence of animé, and preference for youth that marks the style of many of his contemporary compatriots, Sugiura locates his practice in relation to a different set of Japanese (and Western) cultural references. Perhaps most apparent among them is a sense of spiritual immersion in the landscape that seems to draw its inspiration from Buddhist conceptions of nature. Sugiura’s imagery consistently tends towards representations of places and times when object, foreground, and background flow into one another. He has referred to his palette as a systematic use of ‘weak color,’ influenced by his observations of how the seasons change; Sugiura is interested in the delicacy of natural variation as it is affected by light and weather.

In their whiteness and their fascination with transience, the photographs in the ‘Daydream’ series also recall more recent investigations of monochromatism and the passage of time in both Western and Eastern art. Two artists who come to mind in this regard are Robert Ryman and On Kawara. Sugiura’s images also take their place within the lineage of cloud and sky studies that can be traced throughout the history of photography and painting. But because they seem to have been taken from within the clouds themselves, they destabilize the viewer’s point of reference, as well the traditional role and positioning of the observer.

For Sugiura this immersion in the natural world, and the consequent way that attention is paid to intricately quiet moments of beauty, evokes a particularly Japanese sense of aesthetics. That he seeks these moments outside of the urban context speaks to his feeling for a visual alternative to the dense and frenetic texture of much of contemporary life. In this sense his work has a strong, if subtle, activist quality that argues for the importance of spiritual reflection and contemplative involvement with nature.

Keita Sugiura was born in Tsuyama, Japan in 1980. In 2008 he received an award from Gesai, the Japanese art fair founded by Takashi Murakami’s artist-run enterprise Kaikai Kiki. In addition to his 2009 New York debut in Max Protetch’s Project Space, Sugiura has been the subject of one-person exhibitions in Tokyo and Okayama. His work is included in the collection of the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. He lives and works in Tsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan.