ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FLOWERS I I I

Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki collaborate once again to further their pioneering Encyclopedia of Flowers series, which focuses in part on market-related changes that impact floristry, such as the disappearance and new emergence of species, as well as on changing the common perception of flowers. Following the first volume in 2011 and the second in 2015, this third dazzling instalment features a greater variety of styles, reflected in photographs divided into seven chapter-categories that include Coexistence , Hybrid , Chiaroscuro , and Autogenesis . The myriad arrangements done in Azuma s singular style are expertly captured by Shiinoki s camera.

Flowers have been a universal cultural object for millennia. They are an important aesthetic element in everyday life worldwide, and have played a highly symbolic role in art throughout the ages. Over the past few years, Makoto Azuma has created a furor in the art world with his floral installations, in which he creates unusual new shapes from plants and flowers and their component parts. Inspired by the Japanese tradition of ikebana - the art of flower arranging - Azuma creates novel and previously unseen aesthetics by bringing together unusual plants that wouldn't usually meet in nature-some of them exotic - in extraordinary arrangements. Shunsuke Shiinoki, who opened the "haute-couture" florists Jardin des Fleurs in Tokyo in 2002 in association with Makoto Azuma, captured these exceptional floral installations in extraordinary photographs.