Artist Statement

The Way of Flowers

The Way of Flowers is a long-term conceptual painting project structured around the creation of exactly one thousand works over a period of 10–20 years. Each painting is conceived not as an autonomous artwork, but as a fragment of a single continuous work that develops through time.

Within this framework, the works are understood not as independent images, but as successive manifestations of the same painting, repeatedly revisited and rearticulated at different moments in the artist’s life. Each piece maintains a recognisable formal structure and compositional logic, while the palette shifts from work to work, registering different chromatic states of the same image. Every painting is assigned a unique number and date, which function as temporal markers within an ongoing process rather than as indications of a completed or definitive result.

Within the project, color operates as the primary site of artistic experience, while form remains secondary—reduced to a minimal and universally legible sign. The image of the flower is employed not as a motif or narrative subject, but as a neutral and widely recognisable structure through which abstract chromatic experience can remain accessible beyond specific cultural, linguistic, or geographic contexts.

The project deliberately rejects the notion of finality or the pursuit of an “optimal” version. Artistic practice is approached as a sustained condition: a single image lived through multiple canvases across extended time. Each painting is not an improvement upon the previous one, but a factual moment within a continuous gesture that resists closure.

In a context where visual images are increasingly produced by algorithms and digital systems, The Way of Flowers deliberately remains a fully analogue practice. Repetition here functions as a manual algorithm: the artist returns to the same motif, generating each new version from the accumulated memory of previous iterations rather than from external digital references. In this sense, the artist operates as an interface through which a single image generates its own subsequent states.

A central component of the project is the public exposure of the process of making. During exhibitions, new works are created directly within the exhibition space throughout its opening hours, transforming the exhibition into an active studio. Viewers encounter the work not as an isolated finished object, but as an ongoing activity marked by pauses, hesitation, revision, error, and a constant tension between intuition and control.

This exposure does not foreground the artist’s body, but reveals the structure of artistic thinking itself: the anxiety of the empty canvas, the internal conflict between impulse and discipline, between repetition and variation. Each exhibition thus becomes not merely a presentation of results, but a continuation of the work itself, consciously dissolving the boundary between production and display.

Ownership of a painting within The Way of Flowers is understood as a form of participation rather than possession alone. When a work enters a private collection, it remains part of the project’s extended structure, and the act of transfer is recorded as a component of the artwork’s ongoing history.

In certain instances, participation in the project may occur prior to the creation of a specific painting. A future work may be assigned a number in advance, allowing the acquisition of a forthcoming stage of the process rather than a predefined object. The form, scale, color, and moment of appearance of such a work remain undetermined until its realisation, reinforcing the project’s understanding of art as a temporal and open-ended practice.

The title of the project refers to the notion of a “Way” as an ongoing artistic practice rather than a goal or endpoint. In this sense, it enters into dialogue with Japanese aesthetic traditions in which value emerges through repetition, discipline, and gradual transformation over time, echoing the idea of dō—the Way—as in calligraphy or tea ceremony. More specifically, the project resonates with the concept of hanamichi not as a direct cultural citation, but as an understanding of practice that unfolds publicly through continuous action and presence rather than through isolated finished masterpieces.

The Way of Flowers investigates the threshold at which an image becomes art and poses the question of the primacy of the artist or the artwork without offering a definitive answer. The one thousand paintings form not a series, but a single visual and temporal continuum—one work extended across decades, multiple materials, and a plurality of contexts in which it exists.

In some cases, new works are produced on top of existing paintings by other artists. In such instances, the original work functions as a historical and material layer on which another state of the flower emerges. This gesture is understood not as an act of erasure, but as a re-inscription that incorporates the earlier image into the ongoing process of transforming a single motif.

⸻

Participation in the project

For questions regarding participation in the project, please refer to the “Participation” section.