Flower Punk
The ephemeral art of Azuma Makoto
The Japanese system of floral symbolism is called hanakotoba. Thought to have emerged in the late 19th Century, directly translated, hanakotoba means “flower words”, and the practice intertwines with traditions of ikebana – Japanese flower arrangement. Iris (shobu) for strength, courage and protection. Chrysanthemum (kiku) for longevity and rejuvenation. Cherry blossoms (sakura) for the transience of life.
By Shannon Devy
Fittingly, it’s via cherry blossoms that I first encounter the floral artist Azuma Makoto. The installation is called Sakura X envy. An explosion of pink cherry blossoms hangs suspended in a run-down, rusted-out industrial barn. Below it, the legendary Japanese post-hardcore band, Envy, screams and thrashes. It’s a striking, surreal juxtaposition of the type characteristic of Azuma’s work. It’s also a perfect reflection of Azuma’s origin story.
Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1976, Azuma moved to the Tokyo metropolis in 1997 with his high school punk rock band to pursue a music career. It was a formative time. “I learned that a career is not something that is handed to you, but something you have to go after,” Azuma says. To support himself while he waited for the band to “make it”, he took a job at the flower shop behind his house, then another at the famous Ota flower market. It’s the second-largest flower market in the world and the biggest in Japan, with over 5 million flowers traded there daily. It was an happenstance that would change his life. He landed bandmate and photographer Shiinoki Shunsuketo, his childhood friend, a job at the flower shop, too. Together, they’d sit around with their long punk hair and leather jackets, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and talking about…flowers.
In 2002, the pair founded floral atelier JARDINS des FLEURS, specialising in made-to-order haute-couture floral arrangements and installations. In 2009, they opened AMKK, an experimental botanical lab where Azuma would go on to create many of the pieces for which he would become known, including 2014’s Exobiotanica, in which they collaborated with JP Aerospace to send bonsai and floral arrangements into space. “We wanted to find out what kind of phenomenon occurs if we put plants where they normally don’t exist,” says Azuma. This idea expanded to Deep Sea, where they sank huge bouquets of flowers to depths of over 1000m underwater. It took three years to figure out how to manage the technical challenges presented by darkness, pressure and currents at that depth, but the resulting photographs are astonishing.
Azuma’s work is distinctive – hyper-structural, with colour and texture working together to deliver something both beautiful and strange. As important as its physical construction are the contexts in which he presents his transient work – huge glass terrariums, a legion of rectangular ice blocks, an abandoned school in Fukushima, outer space. Often, he juxtaposes his lush, bright living medium with cold, lifeless engineering: bulbs sprouting out of concrete blocks, bouquets set in perspex slabs, or bonsai kept alive in elaborate cyber-punkesque life support machines. Speaking to Allison Klaymon, Azuma says, “People call me a punk florist, and of course now I am not actually a musician anymore, but I really value the punk spirit. I don’t play an instrument, but I am able to express myself, my ideas with flowers.” It’s this punk ethos that sees Azuma pushing boundaries in increasingly surprising ways.
Take Metaflorist, for example. An offshoot of the Azuma Makoto Flower Center, Metaflorist allows you to purchase one-of-a-kind “digital bouquets” – NFTs depicting “combinations of plant forms and flowers that cannot be found in reality”. The digital bouquets are fascinating – roses with bulb-like roots, hybrid lily-orchid-roses, bulbs culminating in pumpkins where blossoms should be. Metaflorist releases new limited edition digital bouquets about once a year, and there’s a new drop coming in October.
Sakura for transience and change. It is the transience of the medium of flowers and organic matter – arrested in time through Shunsuketo’s photography – that defines Azuma’s creative approach. Speaking to the New Yorker, he says, “You can see flowers burn through their life at such a fast pace, I want to keep up with it. But as I make an arrangement, it keeps changing and deforming.It’s like chasing the game of life.” Growth, bloom, decline, death, renewal. Azuma sculpts in the fundamental materials of Spring.
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