Today I would like to draw your attention to a contemporary ikebana artist who have also made Land Art related works. Ryusaku Matsuda (b.1948) is one of the more well known Japanese flower artists, with numerous exhibitions in the U.S., Canada and Japan on his record. Ryusaku Matsuda started up as a student at the Mami Flower Design School, so he has been influenced by the same design ideas as Keita Kawasaki whom I've written about in an earlier blog post on ikebana and Land Art. He also had a year of studies in Europe quite early in his career. Since 1993 he's been running Studio Matsuda. Interesting to know is also that another leading contemporary ikebana artist, Naoki Sasaki, is a former student of Matsuda.
Impermanence is the central concept in Matsuda's large-scale installations. He sees his works not as art objects but rather as snapshots within a process. The plants themselves are the key players, helped out by time they tell their own story. 'I've tried to discover the reasons why I create works that take both so much trouble and time and I've realized that my motives are likely to stem from my desire to spend as much time with plants as possible', Matsuda says.
Ryusaku Matsuda was one of the ikebana artist featured at the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari art festival, the first year of the festival's ikebana project. The photos of Matsuda's work are no longer on the Echigo-Tsumari website, but the description is still there if you want to read it.
For this blog post I've chosen works from two different series using bamboo as material. The first is "The shape of air", voluminous forms made from split bamboo that Matsuda have exhibited both as Land Art and in gallery exhibitions. The second series I've chosen, "Bamboo, shape", consists of variations on the natural shape of bamboo.
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| The Shape of Air. |
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| The Shape of Air. Light Version. |
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| Bamboo, Shape 1_1. |
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| Bamboo, Shape 1_20. |
The work of Ryusaku Matsuda has been featured in a Stichting book in their floral design series:
Contemporary Floral Art
by Ryusaku Matsuda
Stichting Kunstboek, 2008
ISBN: 9789058562999
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2 comments:
Thank you very much for your inspirational and fantastic blog. I was looking for info about Ikebana principles applied to landscape architecture... I discovered you and I got hooked. Thanks again!
Your very welcome Chuluman. The last few months I've had a special focus on Land Art ikebana and installations, some of it may be a bit related to landscape architecture too. "Ikebana principles applied to landscape architecture" sounds like cool topic. Please feel free to share some of what you find.
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