KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to announce the opening of Kenji Toma’s solo exhibition Artificial Flowers from Saturday, March 30th, 2019.

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In his previous series The Most Beautiful Flowers, Toma sublimed his long-time adoration towards the 19th century botanical artworks as an homage by using the camera, and connoted the universal aesthetics of real flowers by evenly applying the focus to every details as though works described by the human hand as paintings. The series attained high recognition not only in Germany where the same-titled monograph was published, and United States where the artist currently lives and works, but also in Japan, the United Kingdom, Korea, India, and many other cities in various different cultures.

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Now Toma’s latest series, Artificial Flowers will be disclosed for its very first time at this exhibition at KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY. The works are photographs of silk flowers, which are artificially made by the hands of humans. However in Toma’s works, they vividly seem as though opposing to their destinies of withering and brilliantly blooming with vital lively energy with determination.

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For this series, the flowers are photographed in a cluster, different from the previous series in which each flower were taken one by one. The flowers bunched together will not only be presented as one photograph, but also as “half-automatically separated pieces” as a new trial. The half-automatically divided pieces, which include close-ups of flowers even beyond the artist’s intention, captivate the viewers with unexpected beauty as if they were called by the inner voices of the imitated flowers.

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As we face a period in which artificial intelligence may reach the point of singularity, Toma’s new series Artificial Flowers re-questions the concept of organic beauty, which now sways in between the vague border of natural and artificial.