Early life and career in Japan Born in
Kobe in 1919 to parents of Malay origin, Sugai's upbringing proved unstable. After being given to an adoptive family, he was later entrusted to his biological parents again, now divorced. Hospitalized for heart failure as a young boy, he remained bedridden for two years. At fourteen, he studied briefly at the Osaka School of Fine Arts but was unable to complete his studies due to his ill health. Sugai began his career in advertising for the Osaka-Kobe based railway company
Hankyu, where he worked from 1937 to 1945. To make ends meet, he illustrated elementary school textbooks. After studying Japanese-style painting (
nihonga) with the renowned
Nihon Bijutsuin member Teii Nakamura, he became interested in avant-garde painting. In 1957, he illustrated
La Quête sans fin, a book of Jean-Clarence Lambert's poems, with his lithographs. That same year, he married a painter Kawamoto Mitsuko, whom he met in Paris. Sugai's style changed drastically after 1962. He abandoned informel-style materiality for matte, crisp surfaces, which ultimately led to his adoption of acrylic paint. The vaguely calligraphic signs that filled the canvases of the late 1950s were replaced by clearly-delineated geometric forms. He also began working on more monumental formats. A significant catalyst in the development of this new, hard-edge, technological aesthetic was his purchase in 1960 of a Porsche. Between 1964 and 1968, Sugai produced about fifty works, each of which containing the word "Auto" in their titles, including ''Autoroute de l'après-midi, Autoroute du matin, Festival Autoroute, Autoroute au soleil.'' During an interview, Sugai expressed his interest in the universality of road signs and symbols: "On the highway, road signs transmit a clear message that any driver, irrespective of nationality or culture, can grasp in a fraction of a second. In the same way, I only want to use the most direct terms [...] This is why I use basic primary colors." In an essay, the painter Ousami Keiji argued that Sugai's autoroute aesthetic allowed the artist to break away from the stereotypes of japonisme in order to impose his own identity. In 1967, Sugai and his wife suffered a major car accident while driving at extremely high speeds. While neither were killed, Sugai broke his neck and was hospitalized in Paris. However, this did not keep the artist from getting back on the road, and he soon purchased another Porsche. To aid him in his return to the studio, he hired an assistant, who began helping the artist prepare for his exhibition at the Japanese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1968. In 1969, Sugai returned to Japan after 18 years of absence, having been commissioned to create a 16-meter long, 3.6 meter high mural in the entryway of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Entitled
Festival of Tokyo, the mural was the largest work the artist created during his career. Two solo exhibitions in Tokyo and Kyoto were held during his brief stay in Japan, his first ever solo exhibitions in his home country. From the 1970s onwards, Sugai began working in series, and in 1977 he began focusing mainly on the production of lithographs. He regularly returned to Japan where a large number of retrospectives of his work were held. In 1981, he created artworks with his longtime friend, the poet
Makoto Ōoka. At the occasion of an important retrospective organized in 1983 at the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, the artist and poet reunited to create a work 10 meters long and 1.3 meters high, composed around an illustrated poem. Sugai was regularly featured in international exhibitions from the 1960s onwards and received numerous prizes. These include the Grand Prix at the 1961 Grenchen International Triennial of Color Printing, the Grand Prix at the 1965 Krakow International Print Biennial, and the Prix d'honneur at the 1972 International Print Biennial in Norway. In 1996, Sugai returned to Japan to receive the Shiju-Hosho prize, awarded by the Emperor of Japan to individuals with high cultural merit. He died Kobe on May 14 of that same year. ==Collections and Selected Exhibitions ==