Last week, on a cloudy and sweater-worthy spring day in New York, the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto had a little tea party in his secret Japanese teahouse. Built in 2011 above his studio, the teahouse lies somewhere atop a nondescript white building in Chelsea, beyond a hand-operated elevator, and through a few labyrinthine hallways — even if a visitor has the correct address, he might be skeptical of whether this is the right place.
Given the occasion, the lack of sunshine outside was more than just lame cocktail party fodder: Sugimoto’s work depends directly on the presence of the sun. In his expansive and vibrant exhibition “Colors of Shadow,” which was first shown as part of a career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in February 2006, Sugimoto used Polaroid pictures to document the intersections of hues that emerge when dawn’s light passes through an obelisk prism apparatus. No sun, no art.
Now these snapshots, glorious blown-up bits of a rainbow, are set to become Hermès scarves. The company’s creative director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, named Sugimoto as Hermès’s third “carre d’artiste,” a visual artist invited to collaborate with the legendary fashion house.
After receiving an invitation to the tea party celebrating the new scarves, this reporter rode the ancient elevator in Chelsea to the 11th floor. It stopped with a jerk. After a few turns, there stood a man in a white dinner jacket.
“Hello, sir,” he said. “Would you like any tea?”
Gladly. But this was not Sugimoto’s tearoom, it was his studio, and the tea party’s mad hatter was nowhere to be found, either. What was there instead? Well, two beautiful Hermès scarves announced their presence on the necks of mannequins. Beyond that the studio was mostly bare, apart from the sine equations, cosine equations, and geometrical formulas scribbled in pencil on the walls. This made sense: the bends and ruffles in the scarves, they were parabolas. The silk, upon first touch, dribbled through fingers like mercury.
“You found the scarves, yes?” Sugimoto said.
The artist was standing and then offered a bow. He was wearing an off-white shirt with chunky black buttons, and comfortable-looking pants.
“Let’s go up to the tea room.”
The stairs led past little fountains with gray, cheek-smooth stones, a wooden lean-to on the right, and a massive window beyond it. The bottom part of Manhattan, 26th Street to Wall Street, was laid out under the ceiling of clouds.
“I rented the space for the storage,” Sugimoto said. “But I saw this beautiful view so I said, ‘Let’s make it a tea house!’”
Even in the poor weather, it was quite the view.
“This is a modern tea house,” he continued as attendants served the beverages and platters of sushi (the tea party was catered by Nobu).
“People don’t have to take your shoes off,” he said, plopping down on a stool and disregarding the traditional folded-leg position. “And you can sit like this.”
The Hermès commercial silk director, Victor Borges, sat across from him.
“We’ve known each other for a long time,” Sugimoto said, gesturing towards Borges. “The scarf project, they came to me when I was already working on this series. I had 200 all together and we chose 20. It’s a nice group, we’re presenting the differences, but it’s hard to choose. Maybe this is yellow, and this is some other yellow over here.”
There will only be 140 scarves — seven printings of the 20 designs — but the process of making the pieces took two years. Hermès had a new inkjet machine manufactured for the project, one that can recreate the precise shadings of the pictures on the silk. It takes three weeks of non-stop inking to finish a single scarf.
“It’s part of the process,” Borges sighed. “We knew when we would start, we didn’t know when we would finish.”
The original “Colors of Shadow” project was equally painstaking. For 10 days in his studio in Tokyo, Sugimoto arose at 5:30 in the morning to shoot in tiny timeframe, the only point when the rising sun would hit the prism in the right way. The colors were refracted from the prism to a certain spot on the white wall, shifting as the sun rose. Then, Sugimoto would shoot certain parts of the rainbow with his Polaroid.
He likened it to hunting wild game.
“It’s a free held camera, so I’m able to move around,” he said. “Sometimes I’m photographing only this corner here. And it’s constantly moving, because the sun is always coming up. It is like shooting an animal, but instead I’m shooting a moving color.”
The idea to approach light and color in this way came from Isaac Newton — the artist mentioned that Newton’s book “Opticks,” from 1704, was a major touchstone. Newton may be synonymous with rules of physics, leaving his work with colors as more of a deep cut from the oeuvre. But when flipping though the beautiful book that accompanies the original Sugimoto exhibition, it becomes clear that the motion — the moving colors, the mixed colors — define what the artist is trying to do. Though big and hardback, it’s more flipbook than coffee table book — when you skim the pages, the hues move like waves.
Perhaps this explains why the project can be appropriated to the buoyancy of a scarf. Though Sugimoto claims to be a fashion dilettante, he understands the translation.
“This is my very first experience collaborating with the fashion field,” he said. “It’s not a painting — well, you can hang it on the wall, but you can wear it. People can use their tastes to choose – there are four corners so you can choose the way you want to wear it.”
The scarves will be hung on the wall — as art — at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland, from June 12 to 21. (The exhibition is timed to correspond with Art Basel.)
But as pretty as the scarves will look hung up in a gallery, Sugimoto said it was fun and freeing to design something that can be worn outside, tied around the neck of a someone anywhere from Basel to Chelsea.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a beautiful girl wearing a scarf on the street,” he said.
He was sitting in front of that huge square of silk, its colors cascading from red to orange, the whole thing lit up behind him despite the dark of the cloudy day.
“It’s a beautiful scarf.”