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<       HANAMI      >
Picture
HANAMI. Acrylic. 42cm x 23cm

Blossom Festival, HANAMI
and the transitory nature of life

I have on several occasions found myself in Tokyo's Ueno Park where people gather on blue tarpaulins and makeshift cardboard box tables to picnic, drink and dance beneath the large cherry blossom trees. Here we see the theme of Hanami festival. Amidst the raging colours of life and spring we see in the work the falling blossom, a living Memento Mori, an analogy for the temporal nature of beauty and our inevitable mortality.

Standing as a statue, the geisha holds open a paper chase of skulls to remind the party goers beneath the trees of this message.

On her back she carries the very modern beauty of a city at night from a plane and below that an ossuary of skulls and cars on a scrapheap, the life of technology and the death of it, all surrounded by the eternal universe represented by the decorative stars.

Despite this soaring symbolism she stands on the mundane folding cardboard boxes that are used as makeshift tables and blue tarpaulin.

As a short anecdote; I first came to the park as an innocent walker not knowing why the entire ground was covered with tarpaulins and a single young person on each sitting in the middle, many assembling boxes. Like most sights of inexplicable yet phenomenal absurdity, I took this to be some grand conceptual artwork until returning a few hours later and realising the various companies at play had send their office juniors to "bag" a prime space!


<                              >

  • HOME
  • About Andy
  • CONTACT
  • Cityscapes
    • L.A. From the Hills
    • London Bridge to Shooter's Hill
    • Edgware Road
    • Sydney
    • Sakuta
    • Dog Walker, Tokyo
    • Twilight Osaka
    • Cherry Blossoms, Tokyo
    • Vertigo
    • Osaka City
    • Tokyo Station
    • Tokyo Umbrellas
  • Geisha Series
    • Behind the Kimono Book Forward
    • Tokyo Time
    • Osaka Time
    • Resurrection
    • Noh to Ganguro
    • Neon Nihon
    • Sakuhin
    • Cameo
    • The Three Mystic Apes
    • See no Evil
    • Hear No Evil
    • Speak no Evil
    • Hanami
    • Stardust
    • Static
    • Skulls, Cars, Gods and Stars
    • A Winter's Tale
    • Tea With Andy
    • Cityscapes Book
  • Identity Tales
    • The Grim Reaper's Game Keeper
    • Paradise Lost Series
    • Pistachios and Sparrows
    • Opening Japan
    • Dem Bones
    • Van Gogh on Expressionism
    • In Another Universe
    • Otaku Hive
    • After the Bubble
    • Imagined Spaces
    • Isolation
    • Cubist Thoughts >
      • Four Up
      • The Artist's House
      • The House We Live In
      • Plans for Simon
    • Last Train Home
  • Lockdown Walks
    • Foundlings
    • Oddments
    • Lockdown Videos
    • Lockdown Light
    • Wildlife
    • Lockdown Poems
    • Urban Philosophers
  • ESSAYS
    • Andy Warhol
    • Bubble Artists of Japan
    • Who are the Hikikomori?
    • Christiania
  • Photography
    • Cityscapes
    • Gardens
    • Aquarium