In February 1957 Mao Zedong initiated the “Hundred Flowers Movement” as a campaign designed to promote free and open discussion of the problems facing China at that time. The idea was to have intellectuals discuss the country’s problems in order to promote new forms of arts and new cultural institutions. Mao said “Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.” Mao’s comments have been translated in the west as “Let a thousand flowers bloom” and have come to describe any process of encouraging many ideas from many sources.
Hiroyuki Masuyama’s lightbox photographs contain not just a thousand but tens of thousands of flowers in full bloom. Over the course of one year Masuyama photographed all of the flowers in his environment and later combined details from all of these individual images into a single fully realized image through an incredibly complex and detailed process of montage.
Masuyama combines his individual images digitally in order to arrive at a single strangely unsettling image. His work catches you off guard as at first glance you may think it is of a single beautifully verdant instant before you realize that there is something more to it that you cannot quite put your finger on. His images are not overwrought and appear to be completely natural with every plant co-existing with its neighbour until you realize that such profusion could not possibly occur in real life. You do not have to be a botanist or keen gardener to come to this realization although it would probably help. Rather, it is a realization that there is something too perfect about the scene. It is the presence of too much beauty that simultaneously attracts us and makes us realize that this is not nature but art.
Hiroyuki Masuyama compresses extended periods of time into a single image. Masuyama’s work is a personal and engaging way of documenting the passage of time, by making the artist himself the link between the past and present. His work compresses 365 days and all four seasons into one memorable image.
