STRUCTURAL BLOOM – Structural Flowering –

This exhibition is an attempt to reinterpret the formative philosophy of the Sogetsu school of ikebana and the concept of “sculpture as relationship” inherent in Isamu Noguchi’s stone garden “Heaven,” conceived for the Sogetsu Kaikan, through a provisional structural system called ALL CLAMP. The Sogetsu school has treated flowers not as natural objects, but as formative elements that establish relationships of line, mass, and space. Sofu Teshigahara positioned ikebana as “a sculptural act unconstrained by place or material,” discovering the essence of floral materials not in what they are, but in how they emerge.

In this exhibition, Noguchi’s stones are not fixed directly; instead, they are connected through ALL CLAMP using cushioning material. Branches threaded through the structure cut through space as “lines” in the Sogetsu tradition, while OAO shoes clamped onto the branches rise as flowers. ALL CLAMP is not a device for permanent fixation. It is a mechanism that creates the conditions for structure to temporarily exist. Once the exhibition ends, it will be dismantled without leaving a trace. This provisional nature resonates with the temporality of ikebana, which exists with the inevitability of withering.

Here, the shoes are not products awaiting wear, but sculptural forms that abstract the relationship between body and ground. Stone, clamp, branch, and shoe become a bundle of tensions—between permanence and change, nature and artifice, body and space—momentarily blooming within this site.