SINGAPORE – Internationally acclaimed artist Hiroshi Sugimoto needed to leave Japan to find his calling.

While studying photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, United States in the 1970s, the then-22-year-old found himself an unexpected ambassador of Asian wisdom, having to fend off repeated inquiries of “What is the enlightenment? Are you enlightened?”

He settled on a stock, slightly incredulous answer: “Of course I am, are you?” This was before he began to earnestly study Buddhist text the Heart Sutra, which has shaped his art practice for over 50 years.

“The Beatles went to India to understand Buddhism. That was the time of the flower power. I was among the flower children,” he says with some pride in fluent, American accented English.

In Singapore for his biggest solo exhibition in Asia at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), the 78-year-old is once more reminded of the penetrating insight an external point of view can bring to the familiar.

It was SAM chief executive officer Eugene Tan who persuaded him that his oeuvre was best presented through the prism of emptiness. The SAM exhibition, which includes his works from nearly all his major series, is titled after Heart Sutra precept Form Is Emptiness. Presented in a mandala structure, it will run till Oct 4.

“This is something unique you need to be Asian, to be Oriental,” Sugimoto says of the organisational principle ahead of his show opening. “I’d never thought about doing this new style of conceptual curation. In Japan, Buddhism is cliche. People don’t pay serious attention.”

This coup by SAM – Form Is Emptiness is also Sugimoto’s first major retrospective in South-east Asia – has been many years in the making. Japan’s National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo is also hosting a major survey of Sugimoto from June 16. That will feature some 60 silver gelatin prints of his photography.

For scale, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness at SAM also comprises over 60 works, but expands ...