lit a candle 3h ago55 years old. Those flower installations were something else.
Their story
Junichi Kakizaki (柿崎順一, 1971 to 2026) was a Japanese contemporary artist from Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture, who carried the language of the florist into the world of contemporary art. Working with flowers, leaves, fruit, branches, moss, fungi, stone and soil, he made installations, land art, photographs, films and stage designs for…
Junichi Kakizaki (柿崎順一, 1971 to 2026) was a Japanese contemporary artist from Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture, who carried the language of the florist into the world of contemporary art. Working with flowers, leaves, fruit, branches, moss, fungi, stone and soil, he made installations, land art, photographs, films and stage designs for butoh dance, and he spent much of his career working between Nagano and Sweden. He died in June 2026, aged 55, while staying in the mountain town of Koumi in Nagano to make a new work for an exhibition.
Kakizaki was born on 4 January 1971 into a family in which both parents ran a flower shop, and he grew up surrounded by the nature of Nagano. In a 2020 interview with the Nikkei, he recalled that his father had been an office worker who left salaried life to start the shop as flowers became part of everyday Japanese homes, worked through the New Year holidays in the greenhouse, and read the florist trade press from its first issues. The horticulturist Susumu Nishimura was his great-uncle.
At about 16, while still at Shinonoi High School in Nagano, he began studying flower art under Muneyoshi Tsuchiya. In 1989 he moved to Tokyo to study design and crafts at Yoyogi Seminar Art School, and he then trained in horticulture and floral design at Techno-Horti College of Horticulture under the floral art pioneer Sadao Kasahara, graduating in 1992. While still a student he set up a small flower studio, Fleur de Noël, doing flower work for photography. After a spell at a Tokyo design office, he went to Shizuoka in 1993 to study under Fumihiko Muramatsu, an Interflora World Cup champion, and in 1994 he returned to Nagano to take over the family shop, which he renamed Five Seasons.
From 1995 he became involved with art events at Hasedera temple in Nagano City, and over the following years he designed flowers and stage settings for the butoh masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, the noh drummer Shonosuke Okura and many musicians. For Kazuo Ohno, then in his nineties, he laid white peonies across a red felt stage and later offered thousands of cosmos flowers. In 2002 he founded the flower and dance unit FLORIDANCE with the butoh dancer Richard Hart. National recognition came in 2003, when he won the florists' championship on TV Tokyo's TV Champion and was hailed as the country's florist king. That same year he held his first large solo exhibition, CONNECT, in Nagano and his first overseas performance and exhibition at Fylkingen in Stockholm.
Sweden became a second artistic home. With the choreographer SU-EN and SU-EN Butoh Company he created FRAGRANT (2005), toured as part of the Japan EU Year of People to People Exchanges, and NEW LIFE (2007), the gala performance for the 300th anniversary of Carl Linnaeus, under the patronage of King Carl XVI Gustaf and with costumes by Yohji Yamamoto. A companion exhibition and book, NEW LIFE: Quickening from the Cradle, travelled widely, and photographic works of his entered the collection of Uppsala Art Museum. In 2014 Uppsala University invited him to its botanical garden exhibition Ikebana and Contemporary Plant Art, and in 2022 he staged Beyond the Border in the great hall of Uppsala Castle for the company's 30th anniversary.
At home his work grew darker and more searching. In 2011, shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, he collaborated with the art collective Chim↑Pom on Radiation-Exposed Flowers, sculptures made only from plants gathered around the 30 km zone and from tsunami debris. In 2014 he created the exhibition AMARANTH for the opening of Alexander McQueen's first Japanese flagship store at the request of its creative director Sarah Burton. He showed in Paris, Oslo, Melbourne and the Netherlands, took part in the Sapporo International Butoh Festival with TREE (2017), the Fukushima Biennale, and the Nagano museum survey Shinbism 3, and in 2019 held METAPHOR, a solo exhibition at Alps Azumino National Government Park, with an accompanying bilingual book.
His health was not easy in later years. He lost the sight of one eye to retinal detachment, and in July 2023 he suffered a stroke. In June 2024 the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun reported that, still living with its after effects, he felt it was strange to be alive and was approaching a guest appearance in SU-EN's IKIRU (To Live) in Tokyo as possibly his last stage.
He kept working. In June 2026 he was staying in Koumi to create a piece for View: Rethinking Landscape at the Koumi-machi Kogen Museum of Art. According to the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, he collapsed while making the work; his death was made public in September 2026, and his cause of death has not been made public. The museum opened the exhibition on 12 September 2026 and presented his unfinished final work, Bordeaux Streamline, as a tribute.
He was survived by family including his daughter, Memi Kakizaki, a former member of the idol group Hinatazaka46. His art was built on the brief life of flowers, on their blooming, wilting and decay, and many who encountered it described feeling, through his flowers, both how precious and how fleeting life is.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (en, ja); Shinano Mainichi Shimbun (2024-06-14, 2026-10-27); Whitestone Gallery (2026-09-15); Nikkei Style (2020-04-03); Fashion Headline; The Japan Times (2007). Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“It is strange to be alive.”
Paraphrased from Japanese, Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, 14 June 2024, on living with the after effects of his 2023 stroke
“My father was originally an office worker. As people's lives grew more prosperous, the business of bringing flowers into homes spread, so he left salaried work and opened a flower shop.”
Translated from Japanese, Nikkei interview, 2020
“Works that seem to cut out one scene in the cycle of life let us feel, through flowers, how precious and how fleeting life is.”
Nagano Governor Shuichi Abe on Kakizaki's work, 2019 (translated)
Photos
1Junichi Kakizaki in Azumino, 21 November 2021
Nov 2021 · by People Forever
From social media
5Posts by Junichi, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.