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Reception lounge, Château

A. Makoto Azuma

“Bibliothèque végétale / Block flowers”

published at 27/01/2020
Bibliothèque végétale, installation de Makoto Azuma au Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, 2020 - © Éric Sander

Makoto Azuma is passionate about the world of plants and especially flowers, which he uses to create spectacular installations. His inventive arrangements enable viewers to explore and reflect on the infinite diversity of botanical shapes and colours.

He created a one-of-a-kind herbarium, which is displayed in a specially created library at Chaumont-sur-Loire, featuring real flowers coated with a transparent resin to give them eternal life, and to reveal all their aesthetic, visual and colourful dimensions.

He also presents a fascinating sculpture featuring a white pine.

In the 17th century, Dutch artists celebrated the futility of life by painting “Vanitas”. Makoto Azuma has been driven by the same desire to create a series of contemporary herbaria entitled Block Flowers.

He chooses his plants in an intuitive, subtle and sensual manner, whether at the flower market or in the deepest depths of the Japanese mountains. The plants, chosen at the height of their magnificence, are freeze-dried before being encapsulated in blocks of acrylic resin. The Japanese White Pine, or goyomatsu (literally the “five-needle pine”) is very commonly used in Japan for bonsai.

Makoto Azuma’s artistic intention is both to compare and combine the natural beauty of plants with the artificial beauty of an acrylic cube in order to arouse a new emotion.

He thus succeeds in defying the inevitable, preserving the ephemeral and freezing the beauty of a flower or a pine tree for ever, like an eternal love. Each herbarium becomes a sort of miniature aesthetic time capsule, “that can travel through time, as long as it is not exposed to direct sunlight.”

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Makoto AZUMA
JAPAN
 
 
Born in 1976 in Fukuoka, Makoto Azuma is a Japanese florist who has become a floral artist.
In 2002 he opened his “haute couture” flower shop, Jardins de Fleurs, in the Ginza area of Tokyo. The shop is now located in the Minami-Ayoama district.
Alongside his work as a florist, in 2005 he began to explore a new form of floral artistic expression that he called “botanical sculptures”. His creations began to attract attention very quickly, both in Japan and abroad and he was invited to present his work in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris and Düsseldorf.
In 2009 he created an experimental collective, AMKK Studio, with Shunsuke Shiioki to explore botanical creativity. Since then he has presented his work in museums, art galleries and public spaces in Milan, Belgium, Shanghai and Mexico.
For several years now, he has been passionately involved in artistic projects that enable him to display flowers in unusual and artificial situations, reflecting the “contemporary herbaria” that he creates. His quest is to continue to illuminate, in his own unique way, the beauty of plants.
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The Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire

Aquired by the Centre-Val de Loire Region in 2007, The Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire has become an unmissable site within the spheres of art and gardens. The triple identity of the Domaine : Heritage, art and gardens make for a unique visit within the circuit of the Loire Valley castles

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