A polar bear stands in a frozen landscape. Birds appear suspended above a distant horizon. A carefully painted sky stretches behind animals positioned so convincingly that the scene seems to extend beyond the walls of a museum display. Yet nothing is quite what it appears to be. The landscape is constructed, the animals are preserved, and the apparent wilderness exists within an exhibition case.
For Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, this tension between reality and illusion has provided a remarkable artistic starting point. His photographs of natural history museum dioramas challenge viewers to consider how images create belief—and how easily a convincing representation can be mistaken for the real thing.
At Lisson Gallery in Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Unnatural Habitat revisits this central concern through photographs spanning the history of his celebrated Diorama series, including new images made in 2025 and recently rediscovered negatives enlarged for the first time. The exhibition also introduces color photographs presented as traditional Japanese folding screens, expanding Sugimoto’s investigation from the photographic image into the sculptural space of the gallery. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0″,”turn502482search1”]}/>
On view from September 15 through October 24, 2026, the exhibition marks the artist’s third solo presentation at Lisson Gallery in New York. It also traces a relationship with the city that has shaped his practice for approximately half a century.
The Museum Display as Artistic Discovery
Sugimoto’s Diorama series began in 1975, when he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Two years after moving to the city, he encountered the museum’s lifelike displays of taxidermied animals set against painted environments. Their artificial construction fascinated him: carefully arranged objects could produce the convincing impression of a complete natural world. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0″,”turn502482search6”]}/>
The first photograph he made as an artist was Polar Bear (1975), an image that established the questions that would continue to shape the series. By photographing the museum display, Sugimoto created another representation of an already constructed representation. The camera recorded something that looked like wilderness, but the apparent landscape was itself an illusion.
This double artifice gives the photographs their distinctive psychological effect. At first glance, viewers may accept the image as a straightforward depiction of nature. Closer examination reveals the strange relationship between the animal, its painted surroundings and the photographic process that unites them.
The work asks a deceptively simple question: if an image can make an artificial environment appear real, how much of what we believe about seeing depends on visual persuasion?
Fifty Years of Looking Again
Sugimoto returned to the American Museum of Natural History in 2025, fifty years after his initial encounter, extending the series with new photographs. The resulting exhibition brings together works from different periods, making it possible to consider how his understanding of the dioramas has developed over time. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0″,”turn502482search3”]}/>
Among the works presented are Polar Bear (1975), Lion (1994), California Condor (1994), and newer photographs including Birds of Japan (2025) and Oyster Bay (2025). The range of subjects moves from individual animals to expansive environments, including mountain landscapes and cactus forests. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search1”]}/>
One particularly revealing example is Hunting Dogs. First photographed in 1980, the work was revisited in 2025 when Sugimoto adjusted an uneven section of sky caused by a burned-out bulb inside the original museum display. The detail exposes an unexpected layer of construction: even the illusion of a natural landscape can depend on the condition of an artificial light source. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0”]}/>
The intervention also demonstrates how Sugimoto approaches time. Returning to an earlier subject does not simply repeat the original act of looking. It creates an opportunity to reassess the image, the display and the relationship between what was photographed and what can now be seen.
Photography Between Evidence and Illusion
Photography is often associated with documentation. A camera records light reflected from something that exists before its lens. Yet Sugimoto’s work makes clear that photographic truth is more complicated than this description suggests.
The Diorama photographs are genuine records of museum displays, but the scenes they depict imitate environments that are absent from the gallery. Their realism depends on carefully arranged elements designed to suggest a world beyond the frame. Sugimoto’s camera then transforms that staged scene into another convincing image.
The viewer is caught between two interpretations: the photograph appears to show a real animal in a real landscape, yet knowledge of its origins makes that reading unstable.
This ambiguity is central to Sugimoto’s broader practice. Across photography, sculpture, architecture and other forms, he has explored the relationship between perception, space and time. His images frequently appear still and precise, but their apparent clarity can lead viewers into deeper uncertainty about what they are seeing. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search6”]}/>
At Lisson Gallery, that uncertainty becomes a productive experience. Instead of treating illusion as a trick to be exposed, the exhibition asks what illusion makes possible. The constructed scene can still inspire awe. Its artificiality does not necessarily cancel its beauty; it changes the terms on which that beauty is understood.
A New Dimension: The Folding Screen
The exhibition also introduces four new color diorama photographs presented as byōbu, or traditional Japanese folding screens. Printed on washi paper and produced through traditional Kyoto craftsmanship, the works move beyond the conventions of the framed photograph. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0″,”turn502482search1”]}/>
The format gives the images a physical and spatial presence. A folding screen is not simply a flat surface viewed from one fixed position; its structure creates planes, angles and relationships with the surrounding room. By presenting photographs in this form, Sugimoto brings the image closer to the experience of an architectural object.
Color introduces another shift. Sugimoto’s Diorama photographs have largely been associated with the precision and tonal restraint of black-and-white photography. The new screens offer a different visual register, following his earlier major exploration of color in the Opticks series. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0”]}/>
The result is a dialogue between photographic technology and traditional craft, between the illusion of depth and the physical presence of a screen. The work remains photographic, but its meaning is also shaped by material, scale and placement.
The Natural World, Reconstructed
The title Unnatural Habitat captures the exhibition’s central contradiction. A habitat is generally understood as the environment in which an organism lives. Here, the habitat is an elaborate reconstruction: a carefully designed setting that preserves the appearance of a natural world while separating it from the conditions that produced it.
Sugimoto does not need to make an explicit environmental argument for this contradiction to resonate. His photographs encourage viewers to reflect on the ways nature is represented, collected and made available for observation. In a museum diorama, a complex living environment becomes a static display. Through photography, that display becomes a new object for contemplation.
The photographs also reveal how cultural institutions shape our encounters with the world. A museum display can educate and inspire, but it necessarily selects, arranges and frames what it presents. Sugimoto’s work draws attention to that process without dismissing the value of the original display.
A Lasting Dialogue With New York
For Sugimoto, New York has been more than a place to exhibit. His encounter with the American Museum of Natural History helped initiate one of the most enduring series in his career. Returning to that source fifty years later brings the work into a conversation with its own history. <Cite refs={[“turn502482search0″,”turn502482search3”]}/>
Unnatural Habitat offers viewers a chance to see how an artistic idea can remain productive over decades. The images continue to raise questions about photography and perception, while the new works introduce fresh possibilities through color, paper and sculptural presentation.
At Lisson Gallery, the familiar natural history display becomes something quietly unsettling. The animals seem present, the landscapes appear convincing, and the photograph offers apparent evidence of a world beyond the frame. But the longer one looks, the more complicated that certainty becomes.
Sugimoto’s achievement lies in making this uncertainty feel less like a failure of vision than an invitation to look again. His photographs remind us that seeing is never only about what stands before us. It is also about the images, assumptions and acts of imagination through which we understand the world.
