shashasha

"Lurid blue sky and violent burst of colors. Perennial flowers offered to the dead. A blurring silhouette, the conviction of having ventured into the other side, and a dizzying senstation.

It was the year of 2000 when I first encountered the sight where artificial flowers were stuck out from the clod of earth covering the grave. From then on, for six years, I had continuously paid a visit to grave sites
in order to get a shot of those flowers. To Mexico, Guam, Saipan…
Flowers featured in this book are all artificial flowers, fake flowers.

Under the unrelenting blaze of the sun, real flowers will wither after a short period of time. Strong sentiments of the people who wish to hold onto memories of their loved ones, perennial flowers dedicated to those who lived out a given period of time with hope for eternity. Flowers intertwining with grasses bloom toward the blue sky and insects rest their wings. It is the nirvana on earth where the space-time gets twisted, the boundary between life and death become fragile, and I repeatedly get a sensation as though my own silhouette starts to dissolve.

After all, it’s pretty easy to cross over the other side."

-Mika Ninagawa, October 2006.

Published by Shogakukan in 2006, Mika Ninagawa’s Everlasting Flowers takes a look into both the aesthetic and ritual symbolisms of flowers. Within, the images present a visual array of colour and splendor, each capturing its own fragment of an edenic landscape set amongst the backdrop of the memorials of graves, Everlasting Flowers is a vivid portrayal of a garden of life and death seen through the artificial manifests and symbolisms of floral tributes.