Makoto Azuma is the Indiana Jones of florists. He has fired flowers into the stratosphere and plunged them to the bottom of the ocean. One of his favourite tactics is to preserve specimens at their moment of maximum beauty, in blocks of clear resin, which is how visitors to this year’s NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria, will experience his work. In the installation, A Chaotic Garden, we see a room lined with exotic floral specimens, apparently frozen in time. At first we might think how wonderful it would be to preserve ourselves at our own youthful peak, but Azuma is telling us that beauty can only be made permanent when it is removed from the stream of life.
This dialogue between life and death, beauty and decay, adds a sense of drama to the stately art of flower arranging. Over the past decade it has made Azuma a rising star in a global contemporary art world that thought it had already seen everything.
Born in 1976, in a small town near Fukuoka, Azuma developed a teenage passion for punk rock. When he relocated to Tokyo in 1997, with his best buddy, Shunsuke Shiinoki, they started a band. While still dreaming of a musical career, Azuma took a job as a florist, and discovered his true vocation. By 2002 he had opened his own shop in the Ginza, called Jardin des Fleurs. Three years later he began to experiment with flower arrangements as contemporary art. Today he is one of Japan’s leading florists, and the most prominent ‘flower artist’ in the world. His story is told in Alison Klayman’s short documentary, Flower Punk (2020), which may be accessed online.
Today, Azuma’s shop/studio is located in a discreet back street in Minami-Aoyama, with office upstairs and workspace downstairs. In the office one finds Shunsuke, who has remained an integral part of the operation, being the only one Azuma trusts to photograph or film his projects. As flowers have such a brief life cycle, photography is a crucial component in the work. The other regular presence in the office is a rabbit named U-ko, who roams whereever he pleases.
Every day, in the steely downstairs studio, which feels more like a bio-tech laboratory than a workshop, Azuma fills orders from clients, which are completed by a small team of assistants. The way he describes it, this is not just a business, it’s a spiritual exercise that brings him into daily, hands-on contact with the “living creatures” around which his life revolves.
Unlike most of his peers who are happy to drop other activities when they are finally able to work as full-time artists, Azuma has no intentions of giving up his day job. In fact, he will turn down a big commission if he feels it doesn’t fit in with his own ideas, formed in a constant “conversation” with flowers.
He describes his artwork as “a never-ending journey”. He wants to hear what the flowers are saying to him, what they’re trying to express. He “needs to touch them every day, to keep the relationship alive.”
Azuma’s emphasis on working with his own hands has not hampered his increasingly grandiose schemes. In 2014, his Exbotanica I: Botanical Space Flight, sent a massive bouquet of flowers 30,000 metres into the sky, where the temperature is -50 degrees C. Three years later, his Sephirothic Flower: Diving into the Unknown (2017), plunged 100 varieties of flower beneath the waters of Suruga Bay, off the coast of Shizuoka. When retrieved from a depth of 1,000 metres, it was found the colours had been enhanced.
Azuma has burned and exploded piles of flowers, as a kind of spectacular funerary rite. He has frozen them in blocks of ice, compacted them into cubes, placed them in deserts and on rafts. In 2018, he and Shunsuke travelled to Fukushima to create a large botanical sculpture as an offering of hope for the region’s recovery from the devastation of the tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011. It was one of many projects that had no commercial basis, being something he felt compelled to do.
He tells a story about one of his largest and most lucrative projects – to design a flower installation for a royal wedding in Dubai, during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The photos of this gargantuan project are astonishing, but Azuma has never felt happy with it because he was unable to travel and take part in the fabrication. It was constructed by remote control to his specifications, but not to his inner satisfaction. In Azuma’s own words, “it showed why I must never let others makes my works. My passion wasn’t realised in that piece.”
Over the past ten years Azuma’s floral creations have seen him flying to all parts of the world – except Australia. He claims, however, to be one of the world’s biggest buyers of Australian flowers which he has used in numerous works. The NGV Triennial is finally bringing him to this country, where he is visiting Melbourne, and then Tasmania, in preparation for a project next year at David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art.
Azuma’s embrace of modern technology makes him a model artist for MoNA, which favours crossovers between art and science. Yet to spend an hour with Azuma is to discover that his motivations are fundamentally spiritual. He continually talks about his “conversations” with flowers. He says he prays for them and tries to find ways to help them express their beauty.
Because “the language of flowers” is spoken all over the world, Azuma contends that anyone on earth should be able to relate to his vision. Because nature is common to us all, he feels that his flowers allow him to connect with issues such as global warming, without making overtly political statements. While he doesn’t think flowers will ever stop a war, he believes there is a universal need to experience beauty, and this can be “a small but serious reason for people to stop and rethink some aspects of their lives.”
The bottom line, he says, is that everybody loves flowers.
Makoto Azuma features in the NGV Triennial,
3 December 2023 – 7 April, 2024
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 17 February, 2024