青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Unparalleled beauty, larger than life: a unique compendium of the world’s flowers.

In the third volume of their series surveying the astounding range of plants made available by the ever-evolving floral industry, Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki continue their quest to preserve some memory of the blooms that briefly live and die in service of human desires. Narratively compelling and with sweeping thematic scope, the arrangements and photographs capture the short-lived beauty of flowers as never before.

Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki, both born in 1976 in Fukuoka, opened the Jardins des Fleurs custom florist studio in the Ginza district of Tokyo in 2002, later moving it to Minami-Aoyama. From around 2005 they also started working together on projects in which Shiinoki photographs “botanical sculptures” created by Azuma. Azuma’s daringly experimental floral works have been shown in many places outside of Japan, starting with a solo exhibition in New York; he established the Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyujo (AMKK) botanical lab in 2009 and has recently been focusing on exploring the connections between human beings and flowers.