Welcome to the eleventh insertion of DEMUR®, a series where we will be highlighting some of the most interesting topics in all of art. This week we’ll be stopping to smell the physical roses of Azuma Makoto’s botanical sculptures, and their unreal environments.
Azuma Makoto, a Japanese native, always dreamt of a radical career in the rock music scene. Moving from the countryside of Japan to the fast-paced mega city of Tokyo in 1997, the young creative found a love for the unique emotion lying within music and art. Pursuing his dreams with little to no success, the unknown artist seeked reliable income as a means to support himself and settled for a part-time job at a flower shop. Infatuated with the natural beauty flowers and plants withheld, he began applying his ever-evolving knowledge into his own works of botanical art.
First founding Jardins des Fleurs, a small flower boutique in Tokyo (2002), the ambitious creative then moved on to work with living art, creating small botanical structures throughout the 2000’s and large-scale productions with research institute Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyujo (2008). Azuma Makoto built his portfolio and honed his technical ability for nearly a decade until drafted for set design regarding the Spring ‘17 Dries Van Noten womenswear show. This was Makoto’s pivotal moment in the abstract flora industry, working among Noten to select vivid life forms and freeze both time and water in bricks of ice. From here, the botanist has only seen commercial success with his progressive, slightly absurd ideas.
Azuma Makoto looks at each blossom with a level of personality, pushing his otherworldly assemblies. He advises to always “try to spend some time face-to-face with [the plant] and try to listen to its voice”, exemplifying his appreciation for nature and each individual bloom. Makoto has since launched a bonsai tree to the stratosphere, submerged a variety of bouquets in the vast ocean, and even displaced roots within a steel box frame in the arctic as well as the desert. The artist strives to push the boundaries of mother nature and open the iris to the resilience of life, demonstrating the merit of our ecosystem through art.
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