Tokihiro Sato

Tokihiro Sato was born in Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture, and studied sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts. A Tsuruoka Art Forum text explains that, while studying sculpture, Sato became interested in expressing bodily action and the passage of time within the work^*1. A profile by Manabu Torihara identifies Sato’s early contact with photography in his student years, when he became absorbed in mountain climbing and began taking photographs to record his trips^*2. In Japanese art from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, when Sato was studying sculpture, the legacy of Mono-ha, Conceptual Art, and installation had made material, space, human relations, and temporary conditions in a place central concerns alongside the finished sculptural mass. The National Museum of Art, Osaka’s exhibition Mono-ha Reconsidering describes Mono-ha in relation to attempts to move away from established forms and to explore tensions between material and human beings, as well as differences between actual and fictional space^*3. After completing graduate school, Sato moved toward dynamic installations that combined iron sculptures with elements such as fire, water, plants, and soil, all of which change over time^*2. His experience using an 8×10 camera to record his own sculptures strengthened his interest in the image on the ground glass, the fixing of light, and exposure time^*2. The Frist Art Museum describes his experiment of drawing light traces with a penlight beside wire-like sculptures as a discovery that connected light and space through photography^*4. In Photo-Respiration, which grew out of this sequence, exposure time, the moving body, reflected light, and the optical structure of the camera occupy the place once held by sculptural material. From the 1990s onward, Sato’s work circulated through exhibitions and collections in Japan and abroad, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum held the solo exhibition Tokihiro Sato: Photo-Respiration: Presence or Absence in 2014^*5. The exhibition presented about ninety works, including Photo-Respiration, pinhole camera works, camera obscura works, and mobile camera devices, and traced a methodology that had continued from the artist’s early period^*5. In 2015, Sato was recorded as the recipient of the Domestic Photographer Award at the Higashikawa Awards, and the same year Tsuruoka Art Forum presented about eighty new works made in the Shonai region^*6.

Moving the Problems of Sculpture into Photographic Exposure

The point of entry into Sato’s work is the way problems of sculptural mass, place, time, and the body are reorganized within photography. In sculpture, questions of place and time involve the physical object, the site where it appears, the body that walks through it, the distance of movement, the duration of a stay, changes in material, and records such as photographs and maps. From his student years, Sato worked with iron forms and materials that changed over time, and he was interested in bringing bodily action and process into the work^*1. That concern developed through photographs made to record his own sculptures and then moved toward photographs in which action during exposure becomes the work itself. The Frist Art Museum notes that Sato experimented by drawing light traces with a penlight beside wire-like sculptures and photographing the result^*4. In that experiment, sculptural mass, the artist’s body, the movement of light, and the camera’s exposure time are gathered into a single image. The light traces in Sato’s photographs can be read as the result of bodily movement entering the structure by which the photograph is made.

Light Traces in Photographic History

Photographic history includes a method in which contact among light, objects, and the photosensitive surface produces the image. In its discussion of László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, the Moholy-Nagy Foundation describes objects placed on photographic paper during exposure as leaving ghostly traces^*7. The Met introduces Man Ray’s rayographs as a process in which objects placed on or near photosensitive paper are exposed to light and developed, turning recognizable things into strange arrangements^*8. In this lineage, photography is formed through the contact of light, object, and sensitive surface as well as through the depiction of the visible world. Sato’s Photo-Respiration can be read as an extension of photogrammatic contact from the paper surface of the darkroom into landscapes and architectural spaces. The artist moves through space and leaves the reflected light of a penlight or mirror on film. The light trace appears as the result of a body handling light and generating the image within exposure time.

Mono-ha, Land Art, and Expanded Sculpture

Since the 1960s, sculpture has increasingly treated place, time, movement, and action as elements of the work. Place in this sense includes terrain, routes of walking, distance, and the space through which the artist’s or viewer’s body passes. Time includes the duration of making, walking, staying, material change, and later reading through photographs or maps. Richard Long began making walking a form of art in the late 1960s, and Lisson Gallery describes him as an artist who expanded the possibilities of sculpture through the simple creative act of moving through the landscape, engaging place, time, and distance^*9. National Galleries of Scotland describes A Line Made by Walking as a line created by Long walking back and forth across grass until a trace became visible from a certain angle, a record of a brief journey and of the energy expended in the act^*10. The comparison with Long clarifies how sculpture moved from object, pedestal, and gallery toward walking, distance, terrain, and record. Sato carried into photographic exposure questions associated with post-Mono-ha relations between material and space, Land Art’s walking and traces, and the expanded sculptural field’s concern with place and time. If Long’s walking inscribes a line in the landscape, Sato’s walking inscribes a line of light onto the photographic exposure. Long’s trace appears temporarily in the landscape and is shared as a work through photographs and text. Sato’s trace arises as light while the shutter is open and is fixed inside the photograph. Walking and gesture become internal elements in the making of the image.

Bodily Imprints and Recorded Performance

Bodily traces have also been a major question in postwar art and performance. In Yves Klein’s Anthropometry, female models covered in blue paint acted as “living brushes,” leaving imprints of their bodies on paper, and the process was staged as a performance before an audience^*11. In Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, a fixed camera records the artist’s body walking around a square taped to the studio floor^*12. MoMA describes this work as part of a period in which Nauman incorporated ordinary activity and himself into his work and moved art from product toward activity^*12. Sato’s position overlaps with this history of recorded performance, while changing the role of the camera. In Nauman’s video, the camera records bodily action. In Sato’s photographs, bodily action generates the image from within the exposure. The light trace is a record of an act and a structural element of the photograph made by that act.

How the Body Forms the Image in Photo-Respiration

In Photo-Respiration, Sato makes long exposures of nocturnal landscapes and interior spaces while he walks with a penlight or reflects sunlight with a mirror. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum describes the series as work in which the artist moves through the landscape holding a mirror, fixing reflected light and the trajectory of movement onto film^*5. Harvard Business School’s collection text also confirms his use of flashlights at night and mirrors by day, noting that the points of light remain as traces of the artist’s presence while the artist himself remains invisible^*13. The essential point here is the role of the artist’s movement in making the image during exposure. In many photographs, the photographer’s body determines the framing and releases the shutter from outside the image. Sato enters the landscape or architectural space after opening the shutter and marks depth and distance by handling light. The points and lines of light appear as the temporary joining of body, place, camera, and exposure time. Seen against sculpture’s history of placing physical material in space, Sato places the movement of a light-bearing body into exposure time and fixes that temporary structure as a photograph.

What Forms the Image During Exposure

Sato’s method can be compared with the urban construction photographs of Michael Wesely and with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters, both in relation to long exposure. MoMA explains that Wesely has used exposures lasting as long as three years to photograph construction and demolition in cities, producing images in which buildings appear as ghostly forms^*14. Sugimoto states on his official site that, in Theaters, he exposes an entire film projection onto a single photograph, fixing the screen as a glowing white surface^*15. In Wesely, the long duration of urban and architectural change is compressed into the photograph. In Sugimoto, the time of a film screening is gathered into the white light of the screen. In Sato, the photographer’s body enters exposure time, and the act of moving light forms the structure of the image. The difference among the three lies in the length of exposure and, more importantly, in what participates in making the image during exposure. QAGOMA’s text on Breath-graph no. 21 explains that Sato’s own movement is not recorded by the camera, while only the brushstrokes of light pass through the filter, turning the work into a meditation on the temporary occupation of space by a human being^*16.

Lines, Movement, and Repetition

QAGOMA’s discussion of Breath-graph no. 21 also connects Sato’s light traces to an art historical concern with movement in a still image. The text relates Breath-graph no. 22, believed to have been made in the same building, to Italian Futurism and Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as works that address motion and time within a static image^*17. The same text refers to Lee Ufan’s From Line, comparing the repeated downward brushstrokes that mark time and presence with Sato’s light traces^*17. These references offer a way to read Sato’s light traces through line, movement, repetition, and time. The traces resemble brush lines, yet they are photographic events produced when the film receives light emitted by a penlight or mirror. The line is a drawn form and, at the same time, the trace of a body passing through exposure time.

Urban Space and the Expanded Camera

The cities and architectural spaces in Sato’s works appear as sites where bodily action becomes a light trace. POETIC SCAPE’s exhibition Photo-Respiration: City Scape presents Sato’s subjects as light, time, space, and body, and introduces urban architectural space as a site where traces of light emerge through long exposure^*18. QAGOMA notes that the Breath-graph works of the late 1980s and 1990s include industrial and corporate interiors that reflect Japan’s construction boom at the time^*19. Within large halls, stairways, corridors, and architectural structures, small points of light emphasize the movement, breathing, and duration of a body in space. A 2025 text for Photo-Respiration: City Scape describes Sato speaking of spaces within buildings that look like “air pockets,” and presents his way of producing forms of light through bodily movement in such spaces as an approach rooted in his study of sculpture^*20. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum explains that Sato has used pinhole cameras, camera obscura, and camera devices made by modifying buildings and cars, and has presented landscapes transformed by the passage of time and movement as performances and installations^*5. By returning to dark boxes, apertures, lenses, reflection, projection, and exposure time, Sato expands a single image into a spatial event that makes the mechanisms of seeing available to experience.

Breath-graph no. 21 — Gesture During Exposure

Breath-graph no. 21 is an important work for understanding Sato’s early method. QAGOMA records the work as a gelatin silver print made in 1988 and printed in 1991, and notes its large scale of 243.3 × 298 cm^*16. In this work, Sato left a camera fitted with a dark filter open for three hours and drew vertical gestures in space with a penlight^*16. The movement of the body does not settle onto the image; light alone emerges within the architectural space. The large scale shifts the viewing experience from seeing small points or lines of light as effects to encountering them as traces of a body measuring space. QAGOMA’s artist text describes Sato as responding to subtle relationships in everyday urban spaces and landscapes encountered during travel, and as seeking to fix the time in which he stood and breathed there as the work^*19.

Photo-Respiration — Images Lit from Behind

Photo-Respiration can be confirmed as one of Sato’s central series through multiple museums and collections. Harvard Business School Schwartz Art Collection records #63, Photo-respiration as a 1990 work presented as black-and-white transparency film on a light panel^*13. This display format creates an experience in which the image rises through light from behind, as well as through the surface of the photograph. Photo-Respiration Nikko #3, listed by Art Platform Japan, is a gelatin silver print made in 2001 and held by the Utsunomiya Museum of Art^*21. Even within the same Photo-Respiration series, the appearance of light changes with the city, nature, architecture, and region. The points of light do not serve merely as decoration added to a place; they appear as the result of the photographer’s body acting upon the place’s distance, depth, atmosphere, and time.

CC #35 — After the Camera Obscura

Sato’s work extends from photographs of light traces toward an inquiry into the camera as an apparatus. CC #35, listed in Tokyo Museum Collection, was made in 1992 as a silver dye bleach print and is held by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum^*22. The same page notes that, in addition to Photo-Respiration, Sato developed Gleaning Lights using pinhole cameras and Wandering Camera using camera obscura^*22. Through this development, photography expands from a tool that records the external world through a lens into something that includes the camera’s structure, the projection of light, and the viewer’s bodily experience. The 2014 exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum also presented works in which buildings and cars were modified into camera devices, treating photographic expression as something that crosses print, performance, and installation^*5. From this development, Sato appears as an artist who has repeatedly reconfigured the conditions under which photography takes place in each work.

Making the Photograph an Event

Sato’s work is marked by the way it makes photography occur as an event. An exhibition report in Digital Camera Watch introduces Sato as an artist who originally worked in sculpture, took “life” as a theme, and arrived at long exposure through the relation between light and time^*23. The images show landscapes, architecture, sea, streets, cherry blossoms, factories, and projected festival scenes. In Sato’s photographs, the question of what happened during exposure—who entered the place and what kind of time passed through it—carries as much weight as the names of the subjects pictured. The light trace works as evidence of an event outside the photograph and as the form that event receives inside the photograph. Sato keeps the photograph as a still result while incorporating the action that unfolds during exposure into the conditions that form the image.

Museums, Site-Based Production, and Exhibition Space

Sato’s activity extends from museum exhibitions and collections to residencies and workshops in specific regions. The 2015 exhibition at Tsuruoka Art Forum presented about eighty new works made in the Shonai region since 2012, centered on coastal landscapes, urban views, cherry blossoms, panoramas, and pinhole photographs^*1. The same text explains that Sato’s photographs turn landscapes into two-dimensional images while expressing the character and atmosphere of a site and including the artist’s presence and bodily sensation^*1. At the Hachinohe Art Museum, Hachinohe Magic Lantern projected past images onto local festivals, factories, the sea, and rocky sites, layering the places photographed with projected memory^*24. In this development, the bodily action that produces light traces expands into a method for temporarily calling local memory, regional landscape, and vanished events back into the present site.

Space, Time, and Memory in Overseas Exhibitions

Sato’s reception has extended beyond photography exhibitions and museum collections in Japan to overseas exhibitions since the 1990s. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum records his participation in the 5th Busan Youth Biennale in 1990, the 1st Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1993, and the 6th Havana Biennial in 1997, among other overseas presentations^*5. Hara Museum’s Photography and Beyond in Japan: Space, Time and Memory introduced Japanese contemporary artists who use photography as an artistic medium through the concepts of space, time, and memory, and toured North America with works by Sato, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Toshio Shibata, Nobuyoshi Araki, Yasumasa Morimura, and others^*25. In this context, Sato’s work has been received as an example that extends photography beyond the instant and as work that asks how photography mediates body, place, and memory. His position lies in joining photogrammatic contact with light, bodily action in performance, and the problems of place and time in sculpture after Mono-ha and Land Art within long-exposure photography. Photography begins as a medium for recording sculpture and becomes a site where sculptural action takes place. This is the reason to read Sato’s work at the intersection of contemporary Japanese photography and contemporary art.