Kosen Ohtsubo And Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham
IN 2013, I was in Japan visiting schools, museums, and temples to learn more about ikebana, the art of flower arranging. In a used-book shop in Tokyo, I first experienced the explosiveness and charm of Kosen Ohtsubo’s ikebana arrangements. Within a two-volume book on contemporary ikebana from the early 1990s, I found a photo of a man sitting in a bathtub with a mischievous smile, surrounded by irises (Feeling High—Ikebana Bathing/I Am Taking a Bath Like This, 1984); another showed a broth prepared with glass noodles, bok choy, and a sunny-side-up egg bearing the teasing title Can Frizzling Vegetables Be Avant-Garde Ikebana?, 1989.
Kosen is referred to within our community as “The Legend of Ikebana.” He began practicing in the ’60s, working within both classical ikebana (formalized in Kyoto in the fifteenth century) and freestyle ikebana (an approach developed in the ’20s and influenced by various Western modernist traditions). In the ’70s, Ohtsubo helped found the Ikebana Kouboten—the first ikebana exhibition soliciting public participation. The annual show does away with the normal hierarchies of merit: An established ikebana artist might show alongside a musician, electrician, or schoolteacher. When we participated in the exhibition together in 2016, Kosen leaned over and whispered to me, “This is where the most interesting work gets made.” It is this sense of anarchism toward the practice and its long-standing institutions that stimulates his practice.
Kosen lives in Tokorozawa, an hour west of Tokyo, in a striking ziggurat-shape building—designed by architect Hiroshi Nakao—that features a dark-stained plywood interior and a rusted-steel exterior. The second floor serves as his studio and classroom. In Japan, ikebana artists maintain distinctive relationships with local florists and growers, who share seasonal knowledge and information about specific cultivars. Many of Kosen’s own materials—plants that are affordable, abundant, and contain a backasswards beauty—come from wherever he can find them. He famously uses vegetables, one of the few natural products that retain an intimate and urgent relationship to sustaining the body, evincing a proximity we often forget when facing the sheer beauty of flowers. He also uses trash, revealing an egalitarian ethic that runs counter to ikebana’s aristocratic origins and conservative leanings. As Kosen muses in an article describing a 1971 work comprising a garbage bag filled with the discarded clippings of arrangements from other exhibiting ikebana artists: “We call it garbage, but it’s all the same plant that just happened to be snipped with a pair of scissors.”
Ikebana is traditionally taught under apprenticeship. In 2015, I returned to Japan on fellowship to study with Kosen. We began touring Tokyo and its neighboring prefectures to see ikebana shows at department stores and school headquarters, and private one-offs in rental galleries. These visits took us to far-flung traditional sites that are now being “regenerated.” We would arrive unannounced, Kosen holding his iPad to document the shows. He would be recognized instantly; he’s both an ikebana star and a man on the street checking on the pulse of the community.
The photos here bear witness to ikebana’s century-long relationship to photography. Schools have their own in-house photographers and studios, and they produce magazines and publications to document their activities and exhibitions both as educational and promotional materials. The key English-language publications on ikebana were released in the ’60s, but Kosen and his peers hit their stride in the ’70s. Since then, a variety of crucial publications have assessed ikebana’s aesthetic and philosophical developments, but these are in Japanese and seen by few outside the country.
Two years later, I was back in Seattle—now myself a professor of freestyle ikebana—when I received a cardboard box postmarked from Japan containing binders of medium-format film and 35-mm slides. Kosen had sent me an overwhelming portion of his photographic archive of ikebana works, about six hundred images in total. I began to digitize the photos, interested in what it would mean to steward the recirculation of these images—which are documents of the past, present, and future possibilities of the art.
Because ikebana shows typically last only a few days, their audiences are normally restricted to people who live nearby. With this general limitation in mind, I conceived a series of exhibitions in multiple cities where poster-size reproductions of his photographic archive were offered to the public as affordable, open-edition prints. New translations of related texts and interviews are commissioned for each exhibition. The first was at Paid, a project space run out of a garage in Seattle, using a combination of scans produced with Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. For our exhibition this year at Kunstverein München, the project has expanded to include physical ikebana works made by Kosen and me.
In this series of exhibitions, which I regard as Conceptual artworks, Kosen’s images are knowingly replayed out of time, the photos included in each show re-presenting arrangements that cannot be repeated. But the pictures belie reality: In the world, any action is essentially singular, and any perceived equivalence is actually difference. Claiming this reoccurrence of Kosen’s work as a work reasserts the humanity of art, in defiance of monotonous and unthinking technological reproduction.
—Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham
Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham is an artist, writer, and ikebana practitioner who continues Flower Planet, a studio founded by their teacher Kosen Ohtsubo, a pivotal figure in the avant-garde ikebana movement since the 1970s. The studio hosts lectures and workshops and produces writings and exhibitions on various elements of ikebana from antiquity to the present.
FOR MANY YEARS, I made my living working at the Ryusei Kaikan, the headquarters of the Ryusei-ha school of ikebana. It was there, in the 1960s, that I began making ikebana works in a traditional competitive environment—one that also fostered artistic experimentation and exchange.
The Ryusei-ha school is associated with seika and rikka: classical forms of ikebana that dictate specific rules—such as the number and arrangement of branches—often reflecting a cosmological worldview and guided by the close observation of plants. I’ve long made rikka arrangements in the traditional style; in others I adhere to the form’s underlying principles while also challenging its conventions.
Most of these photographs were shot in the Ryusei Kaikan photography studio. The outdoor shots were made in parks and public event spaces. Step on It, 1973, was meant to “step on” traditional ikebana. In May that year, I took green onions—a wholly unsuitable ikebana material—sprinkled them on the ground, placed a steel plate on them, and stepped on it, inviting the audience to do so as well. It became very stinky. Radishes, too, are the opposite of elegant ikebana materials; with their lack of grace, they often look miserable. (They, too, become odorous.) The objects in What Can You See, 1986, were very small: a lightbulb and a hat. I want those who see the photos of these works to feel surprised, even startled, and to sense a slight tremor within them. Ideally, the works should provoke a new way of feeling and perceiving the world.
My ikebana has changed significantly over the years, through my travels and experiences. It was beautiful to see the way people treat flowers along the banks of the Ganges River in India, where vendors sold just the flower heads (not the stems), which I started to use, too. In 2004, I traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan for ikebana demonstrations. In Damascus, where such greenery is rare, I was struck by the presence of branches and flowers in the gardens of large houses. This was well before the city was besieged by war.
More recently, in Munich, I was surprised at how often the people I met referenced the past, war, and fascism in daily discussions. Japan, too, has a dark history of participating in war, and today we generally have a strong aversion to warfare and nuclear weapons. Yet we rarely bring this up in everyday conversation as Germans do. I don’t know what causes this difference, but I find it interesting. In Munich, I sensed the presence of war nearby, and I believe that awareness influenced my work. For our installation Linga München, 2025, at Kunstverein München, I placed metal scraps inside a structure and referred to it as “war debris.” At the center, I placed a candle. It is a prayer for peace.
—Kosen Ohtsubo
Kosen Ohtsubo, born in 1938, is an artist based in Tokorozawa, Japan, and one of the most renowned practitioners and teachers of classical and freestyle ikebana.
