Ichigo Sugawara Art

Ichigo Sugawara was born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1960 and graduated from the Osaka University of Art. While attending Osaka University, he studied under Kazuo Miyagawa, the director of photography for the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. In the Bright Forest series, Sugawara presents a true figure of nature, the reflection of the world and the way of living as a human being. Through his contemplative approach to the universe, nature is presented in The Pillars from the Piazza di San Marco and the Tsubaki as a jointly sacred place reflecting a mystical experience. Tsubaki, (meaning camellia in Japanese) has a special status in the tea ceremony, which was developed as a transformation process of the self, growing with its aesthetic based on quietness, respect and harmony. Photography, for Sugawara, has not been a way of portraying an object, but rather a way of reacting to and receiving an object. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Hanmi Photograph Museum (Seoul), Kobe Fashion Museum and the Gunma Prefectural Museum of History (Japan).