At Tokyo Art Week, Polish artist Katarzyna Krakowiak-Balka uses ikebana to explore the dualities between nature and the artificial, life and death
In ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement, there are three main principles: minimalism, asymmetry, and harmony. Grounded in an ancient polytheism and its Buddhist traditions, arranging flowers becomes a way of harmonising humanity with the natural world – something that feels relevant nowadays amid the constant buzz of social media and ever-growing climate fears. For Polish artist Katarzyna Krakowiak-Balka, ikebana is a tool to explore the dualities between nature and the artificial, life and death. “There’s a spatial relationship within a flower arrangement, which feels extremely decisive,” she elaborates. “Ikebana impresses me precisely because of these spatial meditations.”
Her installation Keeping Flowers Alive: Acoustic Ikebana debuted at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo earlier this month, with a series of live performances that took place during Tokyo Art Week. Krakowiak-Balka invited a cast of artists, dancers and musicians to perform in the experimental art space, which also happens to be the birthplace of sōgetsu-ryū, a school of ikebana created by Sōfū Teshigahara in the 1920s. Teshigahara’s son, the Oscar-nominated, new wave filmmaker Hiroshi, ran the space until his death in 2001, inviting avant-garde artists such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham to perform.
Continuing this avant-garde legacy, Krakowiak-Balka was inspired by the philosophy at the core of ikebana to explore the relationship between the building’s modernist architecture, as well as sound, nature and textile design.“I was looking for analogies between the geometry of ikebana and Kenzo Tange’s architecture,” she tells us. Contact microphones were placed inside pools of water in the plaza, designed by the American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, to amplify the subtle, inaudible sound of flowers, while singers performed in and around the interior, weaving in between the audience, to transform the space into an acoustic chamber. Translucent sculptures made using discarded pleated fabric from Atelier Lognon, behind the pleats for luxury houses like Chanel, were also passed throughout the space, forming part of the installation. “I found in these forms the geometry of ikebana and they became a source of life that I dissolved in Noguchi’s water,” she continues.
Krakowiak-Balka first began to experiment with ikebana during a research stint at postMoMA in 2013, where she digitally reconstructed the interior of the plaza, to hear what it might’ve sounded like in the past. Given the venue’s rich history, it’s not hard to imagine the layers of meaning present in the meditative stillness of the ikebana rooms, and its ongoing dialogue with the experimental noise reverberating from the concert hall below. This very dichotomy between noise and silence is what led John Cage to manifest his most famous composition “4’33”, and led him to remark: “Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.” The same idea applies to Keeping Flowers Alive, which urges visitors to slow down and contemplate beauty in places not seen before. With new iterations of the show expected to materialise across major cities next year, the flowers are not only alive, but blooming.
Keeping Flowers Alive: Acoustic Ikebana by Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka is on show at Sogetsu Plaza in Tokyo now.
