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The leading Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is a man of extreme paradoxes, and his touring exhibition History of History, the inaugural show in the just-opened Institute for Contemporary Culture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, brings that complexity to life.

Comprised of both the artist's own work and objects from his private collection, the show allows us to take the full measure of the man.

On the one hand, his serene photographs of the open ocean – wide, uninflected expanses divided only by the horizon line – are the ultimate symbols of eternity, mindfulness and enlightenment. A man of philosophical bent, Sugimoto calls them his attempt to recapture the experience of the first human who contemplated the ocean, in the dawning days of our species, and as depictions of the two most elemental necessities for life: air and water. Other works in this show, such as his palm-sized 13th-century Buddhist “flaming jewel” reliquary fitted out with a tiny oceanscape, seem like contemplative objects that direct us to the eternal.

Yet Sugimoto, 59, is also the ultimate international art star, with a home in New York, a custom-designed apartment aerie in Tokyo, a list of exhibition engagements as long as your arm (Venice, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Tokyo) and a growing collection of Japanese antiquities, scroll paintings and natural-history specimens (such as fossils), many of which are included in this exhibition. (In the eighties, he augmented his artist's income by dealing in Japanese antiquities – artists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were among his clients – but he shut his New York gallery, Mingei, in 1990.) So which one is he: The Zen monk with a camera or the shrewd businessman with a strategic eye for profit and advancement? Will the real Sugimoto please stand up.

In fact, spend some time with this artist, as I did last week in the ICC gallery, and you will find him nimbly switching gears between the two. One moment he will fall into a kind of wordless contemplation in front of his oceanscapes – photographs that he has been making at locations around the world since 1980. Clearly words do not do justice to his feelings about these pictures; it seems that discussing them would be an embarrassment to him.

The next moment, though, he will – with a caustic lack of sentiment – outline his plans for a private foundation for his art and collections that he is hoping to build beside the sea in Japan, near Mount Hakone. “Even if I am disabled and become paralyzed,” he says, laughing, “I can still click the shutter; I can still make money. It's my retirement plan.”

A conversation about his current collecting activities reveals flashes of avarice and rivalry. He talks with me about his recent passion for medieval miniatures, Greco-Roman antiquities and the set of three used juice boxes from the Apollo 11 moon launch that he acquired at a recent scientific auction. But his big thrill of late is his pursuit of the rare, early negatives made by pioneering British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. Sugimoto now owns 15 of these, which record plants and various oblique views of Talbot's castle near London. They have never been printed, and he plans to make pictures from them. “I spent one whole year's income on these negatives,” he says to me. “But since I will be using it to make my art, I can write it off. I am creating my art by buying another person's art. I call this art anarchism,” he says with a triumphant laugh, “because I don't pay tax!”

Even more delightful to him is his success at stealing the thunder of his slower-moving institutional competitors. “The Getty Museum has 20,” he says, “and the Metropolitan has 10, so I am number two.”

Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Anyone expecting a courtly display of deference from Sugimoto during his public “conversation” with ROM architect Daniel Libeskind on May 31 was also in for a shock. The artist came out swinging, winning the crowd instantly with his witty derision of star architects and their indifference to the needs of the user (in the case of museum design, the artist as well as the public), pummelling Libeskind with his gaily administered humiliations, including the suggestion that the architect would have been “better off to remain an unbuilt architect,” making drawings, not buildings.

Sugimoto then went on to explain the thinking behind the magnificent curving display wall he has designed for the Toronto show. The ICC is a dramatic, angular gallery with sloping ceilings that is strikingly bereft of walls for hanging art on. “I am trying to fit into his difficult space,” he said to me, “so I have to be difficult too. He makes straight lines so I make curved lines. It is my revenge.” Make no mistake: This is one intensely competitive human being.

Talk to him about his art collection, though, another, more soulful side of him emerges. He walks me along the curve of his wall, and we look at some of the scrolls, a number of which are hybrid objects he has made combining antique textiles with his own art (such as his photolithograph of an image he made of one of the famous Nikko waterfalls), or with works of art from disparate cultural traditions.

One such scroll brings together Japanese fabric from the 15th century with a Rembrandt etching depicting a radiant angel visiting shepherds, a work from Sugimoto's private collection. “The image is very much like the image of Buddha descending,” he says, noting the iconographic commonality of the two traditions. “But I am interested, also, in the paper. This is Japanese rice paper that Rembrandt is using. The Dutch are the only real trading partners with the Japanese at this time, “ he says, speaking of the 17th century. “Japanese rice paper was the most prestigious, best-quality paper in the Netherlands used by artists. I wanted to welcome it back to its original home.”

It's the kind of thing that a collector/artist can do with his objects that a museum cannot. But the differences extend beyond the imperatives of conservation. “Museums have to collect according to the confirmed history, the written history,” Sugimoto says. Indeed, the show is an extended essay on the various ways we have of bearing witness to, or accounting for, the past, including his photographs of Madame Tussaud's waxwork figures (such as Henry the Eighth and his wives, or Emperor Hirohito) and several utterly spectacular slab-sized fossils of sea lilies and trilobites dating back 400-500 million years. Like photographs, he says, these fossils record a precise point in the organic flow of time. This is how he chooses to set the stage for his own creations. It's a context that seems to underscore the folly of human mastery, pomp and certitude.

“I have many suspicions about confirmed history,” Sugimoto says. “I find that I spend many nights with these things and they start to tell things to me. … I can feel what they are saying about their own history. And it is not usually written down.”

As he speaks, we are standing beside a vitrine that houses a clay fragment depicting a female form, a broken shard of pottery whose meaning is unclear. “I bought it in a not very elaborate antique shop in Tokyo about seven years ago,” he says. “It's from the Jomon period,” generally dated as between 13,000 and 300 BC, he says. “This is a female figure, we can see that,” he says with a smile, indicating the hard little stylized lumps that are her breasts, “but its expression is quite rare — like shouting, or maybe smiling. It's hard to say.

“I think it's just calling out to someone,” he adds after a moment, regarding her somewhat forlorn expression.

“Maybe someone in another world.” Nobody knows for sure.

In an adjacent case is a flat, circular object carved from jade and decorated with radiating grooves that fan out from a round hole at the centre. Scholars have identified this as a bracelet – Kofun of the fourth century, he says – but the object looks too unwieldy, and the opening appears to be too small for a human hand. “Also, there is no trace of wear,” he says. After a pause, he adds: “Maybe it was some kind of ritual object. But I am just so pleased with it as a contemporary sculpture. Look, this was all done by hand,” he says, bending over to examine it more closely. “Each of these grooves was carved slightly differently, with a slightly different dimension, and you can see how it all comes together.”

The object reminds me of the sculpture of the British artist Anish Kapoor, I offer, admiring it. “Yes,” he says, and he indulges my idea with a diplomatic smile. “But this one is much better.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History continues at the ROM's Institute for Contemporary Culture until Aug. 19 (416-586-8000).