HANAMI. Acrylic. 42cm x 23cm
Blossom Festival, HANAMI
and the transitory nature of life
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!
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!