Ed Aulerich-Sugai: Bodies to grow into, images to heal into

Visual AIDS Research Fellow Dylan Huw considers care and refuge in the work of Japanese-American artist and gardener Ed Aulerich-Sugai (1950–1994)—a “posthumous collaborator” of Robert Glück’s About Ed—who prolifically documented his seven years living with AIDS in vivid paintings, drawings, and dream journals.

Though by no means unknown to those studied in the context in which he worked, Aulerich-Sugai’s body of work has been startlingly under-examined in scholarly, art-critical, and museological contexts. Spending time with reproductions of his drawings and paintings and speaking to those whose lives he touched profoundly has gradually built a picture of a restlessly probing and stylistically inventive artist whose artistic insights into life with AIDS during the epidemic’s peak were confrontational and surprising and above all extremely alive. The institutional omission of his diverse practice is particularly egregious given the admirable efforts of two of his most significant partners—Daniel Ostrow, a social worker; and Robert Glück, the renowned poet-novelist associated with San Francisco’s New Narrative movement—in jointly shepherding his legacy.

This autumn saw the release, by the New York Review Books, of About Ed, Glück’s experimental, genre-crossing memoir, which has appeared in fragments in numerous periodicals (such as The Paris Review and Frieze) and readings for many years. Many of its most moving sections portray with a kaleidoscopic intimacy the breadth of the two men’s relationship, with Glück punctuating the discovery and adventurousness of their freewheeling 1970s existence with snippets of life with Aulerich-Sugai as the disease gradually deteriorated his physical and mental capacities. “Ed’s life,” Glück writes, “is a flow of images, visual, then verbal—furious and sweet.”² They met at a bus stop in the very early ’70s; they had both attended the same showing of Paul Morrissey’s Heat. Partners for most of that decade—Aulerich-Sugai’s twenties—they would remain close. About Ed is not only Glück’s own characteristically playful and baroque play on the AIDS memoir genre but a kind of “posthumous collaboration,” to borrow the phrasing of his recent Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review: Glück was bequeathed the artist’s dream journals, which provide highly intimate and comprehensive insight into the workings of his partner’s subconscious. Aulerich-Sugai’s preternatural ability to remember his dreams, and compulsive documentation of them, mirrors his approach to his work: the artist never adopted an artistic technique, influence, or hobby without having to perfect it, obsessing over fine details until he achieved a mastery that he would just as quickly grow past.

Ed Aulerich-Sugai was born in Honolulu exactly halfway through the twentieth century to Japanese and Hungarian-Jewish parents. He was raised in Tacoma, Washington, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and lived an unlovely but sexually liberated existence in that city throughout the 1970s, where he remained for the rest of his life. When I spoke by video call with Ostrow and Glück, both sat in rooms Aulerich-Sugai had used to create his work, which continues to adorn their walls. Much of his earlier art took the form of quite decorative paintings, with picture-postcard clouds a frequent subject; in the 1980s, he became increasingly formally experimental. Aulerich-Sugai maintained his obsessive painting and drawing practice alongside a day job as a gardener and horticulturist at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As at the Conservatory, in his artwork he tended to the push-and-pull between knowledge and unknowability, to the desperate and ecstatic maintenance of life, to the porous boundaries between physical and immaterial forms of work and of care. He appears in a 1986 cover story on the Conservatory of Flowers, published by the San Francisco Examiner’s Image magazine, looking handsomely downcast.

By all accounts, Aulerich-Sugai was an interior person, quiet, a loner. (From About Ed: “In the early seventies, I taught him to speak. Before that, he was known as Silent Ed.”⁴) In the work he made while living with AIDS, there is little trace of the narratives of protest and community-building that characterize the most canonized artistic production made in urban centers in the United States in response to the epidemic’s first decade. It’s probably not too far off the mark to speculate that this relative lack of explicitly political subject matter, and the intense inwardness of his interests and methods, has played a role in keeping his work from being very widely seen outside of his home city; an artistic essentialism that demands that artists of certain kinds of experiences produce certain kinds of work (usually representational, easily categorized, and consistent in style). Nonetheless, he produced some of the most thrillingly alive depictions of being an actual body being ravaged by the disease’s everyday onslaught of pain, fatigue, and confusion.

An outlier in his oeuvre is a large, horizontal mixed-media work titled He Cries, She Cries: Homage to Our Sisters (1988), which uncharacteristically foregrounds larger social currents. It was made as an explicit gesture of gratitude and solidarity, “to give credit and respect,” Aulerich-Sugai wrote, “to our lesbian sisters in the gay community who have taken on the role of caregivers during the HIV epidemic.”⁷ It depicts disembodied facial features floating against planes of pastel pink and turquoise, and betrays an uncanny emotional pull; Ostrow named it his favorite work by his partner. In the tenderness of its appeal to solidarity and the collective nature of struggle, the work sheds new light on Aulerich-Sugai’s practice with the Cells series and beyond, revealing the empathetic core of all his self-examination.

Multiple meanings of caregiving echo and reverberate across the various stages of his life and his peripatetic practice—and through their afterlives. In addition to Glück’s literary work, Aulerich-Sugai has also occasionally been a protagonist of Ostrow’s research and public speaking. In a talk delivered at the fifth International Conference on Social Work and AIDS on June 23, 1993—six years following Aulerich-Sugai’s diagnosis and less than a year before his passing—Ostrow outlines shifts in his own perception of care as his partner’s condition deteriorated. He writes uncompromisingly of the debilitating effects of the seemingly endless cycles of Aulerich-Sugai’s illness, without shying away from the brutal mundanity of care work, nor from the difficulty of maintaining a meaningful relationship in the way it is usually conceptualized.

Repetition, it seems—as method, as medium, as modality—is another constant. Consider the Meditations series, a group of small, text-centered paintings Aulerich-Sugai made while undergoing chemotherapy. They are both brutally confrontational and informed by Zen Buddhist practices, consisting of concise phrases scrawled and re-scrawled, mantra-like, as a strategy for visualizing the chaos of having to confront the void every day:

He was told he had only a few months left as early as 1988, but lived until 1994, dying the day before Valentine’s. In his final years, recounted at length in About Ed, he became affected by dementia. Glück’s emphasis in these passages is on a kind of ecstatic banality, the cyclical absurdity of illness and recovery, and the atemporal nature of watching a life with whom you share decades’ worth of memories glide slowly toward something like an ending. Aulerich-Sugai’s work stands as a monument to his resilient eccentricity and intellect in the face of prolonged decline. He lives on in his subjects and their fine, imaginative renderings, which maintain their power to provide refuge and healing and transportation to elsewheres unburdened by sickness or distress.

Ed has painted clouds for two decades; still, what does this sky say about him and his world? An emptiness without expectation, a panorama open in all dimensions. Is this the answer to the questions I ask myself ?—What to do with the day and the wide blue sky?—⁸

All artwork images reproduced by permission of the estate of Daniel R Ostrow, custodian of the Ed Aulerich-Sugai Collection and Archive.

About the Author

Dylan Huw is a writer and curator living in Cardiff, Wales. He writes widely about contemporary art and visual culture, usually with a focus on queer and documentary practices. In his independent curatorial practice, he develops dialogic, research-led projects with artists working across disciplines and languages, which might take shape as public assemblies, residencies or publications. He has an M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is an Associate of the situated arts organisation Peak Cymru.

Writing from the 2023 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.