FLOWER ART
by Makoto Azuma
Thames & Hudson, £39.95, ISBN 978-0500210291
A beautiful and poignant book that documents the brilliant and bizarre work of virtuoso Japanese florist Makoto Azuma.
Rosanna Morris is a freelance writer.
Few florists are as out there as Makoto Azuma. To call him a florist, seems understated. His work is mesmerising, mystical and sometimes quite literally out of this world. His sculptures, installations and interactive events seem unreal and the photographs that capture them are so hard to believe you begin to wonder if they were Photoshopped. Was a bouquet really sent into outer space? A bonsai tree suspended in the middle of a desert? A sculpture comprising 9,000 bird-of-paradise flowers built on a beach on the Japanese island of Okinawa? They all happened.
In this 120-page book, Azuma shares his processes with us through astonishing photographs by botanical photographer Shunsuke Shiiki, who records Makoto’s feats in all their glory, most blown up large to full page. The small amount of text is dotted about as paragraphs, giving brief descriptions of some of the projects. The title ‘flower art’ underplays the content of this book and does not prepare you for what you will see as you turn the pages. This is no mere flower arranging – this is alchemy, architecture and floristry all wrapped into some otherworldly wizardry.
The book gives us a bit of biography – Azuma, who hails from the Japanese island of Kyushu, started working part-time in a flower shop when he was 21, going on to open the haute couture florist atelier Jardins des Fleurs in Tokyo in 2002 (now relocated). Since then, he has experimented with daring and radical floral artworks around the world, from London to São Paulo. In recent years, he has been developing projects that place flowers in inhospitable places – space, the depths of the ocean, salt lakes and in permafrost.
His work also explores the connection between humans and flowers, as simple as handing out flowers to people and photographing them holding them. These are the images that gives this book its beautiful poignancy.