Flowers aren’t normally associated with punk, but Makoto Azuma’s botanical disruptor team Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyusho (AMKK) has been working to uproot such notions.
These punk florists have shot flowers into space, blasted their creations with fireworks and had pro-wrestlers tackle flower arrangements in a ring. AMKK also creates jaw-dropping botanical sculptures in a range of unnatural places, from suspending a palm tree in a desert in the United States to submerging massive floral artworks deep underwater, off the Okinawan island of Ishigaki. Almost every year since 2021 (skipping only 2022), the team freezes flowers in the remote parts of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost prefecture, solidifying them into icy sculptures, their petals turned into blurry rainbows beneath the surface.
In the latest exhibition, “X-Ray Flowers,” which takes place in Kyoto through March 30, AMKK takes a closer look at its muse and material, peeking past the outer veneer of plants with X-rays and CT scans.
Though there’s a playful quality to these projects, the team takes its work very seriously. It’s not all just arresting aesthetics. Azuma, 48, regularly uses flowers to pay respects, taking blooms directly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to remember victims of the atomic bomb, and to Fukushima to remember those who lost their lives in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. AMKK has also produced flower sculptures for public spaces for free, one example being in the city of Slavutych in Ukraine in 2019.
Azuma has worked in the flower industry since his early 20s, when he took a job at Ota Market to support his dreams of becoming a rock musician. Instead of pursuing music, he became enamored with the world of flowers. In 2002, Azuma opened a flower shop, Jardins des Fleurs, in Tokyo’s fashionable Aoyama district, with photographer and former bandmate Shunsuke Shiinoki. His enthusiasm was still unquenched, so he started the now-15-member AMKK collective in 2009.
What began as a small-scale creative project has led to collaborations with global celebrities such as Rihanna and brands including Dior and Chanel. Many request the ice sculptures: bespoke bouquets of flowers reaching upward, suspended mid-photosynthesis.
AMKK’s latest exhibition, “X-Ray Flowers,” is the culmination of seven years of work. The team started with the idea of using X-ray and CT scans to look inside flowers. They have been working with CT technologists, who help with the highly specialized imaging techniques.
The process wasn’t without its challenges. The amount of water a flower contains significantly affects the ease with which the X-ray could be taken. Plants with lots of water content, such as cacti, had to be shot at closer range, and vice versa for drier types. It was a painstaking operation, involving threading an intricate mesh net-like structure — which is visible in some of the images — to balance the specimens upon.
“As each X-ray takes a significant amount of time, we tried to fit more botanicals on each slide, grouping together by shape like a jigsaw,” Azuma tells the Japan Times via a video call. “I encourage anyone seeing the images to look out for these hints at the process.”
The constraints that the team faced while taking the images pushed their creativity further. “The color of flowers really shapes the way that we see them,” Azuma says. “In our normal works, there are certain flower and plant combinations that we wouldn’t put together. But images from an X-ray don’t show color, so we make judgments based on other information, such as the shape of the flower, the veins inside it and so on. We can discover new things that may not have occurred to us before.”
Azuma points to the Gomphocarpus physocarpus, also known as the “balloon plant” (among other colorful nicknames), as an example. Through the naked human eye, the inside of the opaque, inflated head of the plant is indiscernible. Yet through the X-ray scan, it is possible to see multitudes of seeds.
The results of AMKK’s seven-year labor are on display in the basement of the Kyoto Shimbun Building, the disused printing press for Kyoto city’s main newspaper. (The facility closed down in 2015, though the Kyoto Shimbun still circulates, albeit in reduced numbers.) The cavernous 1,000-meter-square space with a 10-meter high ceiling is starkly different from the classic white-cube gallery space. You enter through the ground floor, then descend into the depths where exposed metal and concrete hint at what the space once held: an extremely busy printing press, churning out 800,000 newspapers each day.
The “X-Ray Flowers” exhibition showcases 125 backlit X-rays arranged on plinths around the hall, with 20 CT scans displayed on monitors. Aside from the light emitted from the exhibited pieces, the space will be pitch black and visitors can request a magnifying glass to closely inspect the X-rays. However, there won’t be any placards, short descriptions or even plant names. “We want people to focus on the plants in a whole new way, free to interpret them as they see fit,” Azuma says.
The exhibition opens with a performance from U.S.-based soul-punk band Algiers. A long-time collaborator of AMKK’s, with previous meetings taking place in Bulgaria, England and California, this will be the first time that the two groups perform together in Japan.
While the exhibition’s runtime is only 10 days, the show comes at a fitting time for gazing upon ephemerality as it coincides with Kyoto’s cherry blossom season. “I hope that many people who are passionate about flowers will come and visit,” Azuma says.
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