Roots and Shoots: Fumi Imamura collages set the imagination free to grow
Written by Miko Takama
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Red flowers are a recurring emblem throughout Japanese artist Fumi Imamura’s work. They appear in clusters, in dense constellations, in enveloping fields of colour. In 2015, she created a series titled A Warm House, consisting of 35 works made from a desire to wrap herself in red flowers. Installed across the walls of her studio, they conjured a profound sense of physical reassurance. Colour, repetition, and enclosure worked together to produce something more like an atmosphere than an image – a space with warmth and presence that could be inhabited.
The prominence of red in Imamura’s work emerges from an intuitive and personal place rather than from a deliberate engagement with cultural symbolism. Yet the colour inevitably resonates within a broader cultural context. In Japan, red is traditionally associated with protection and vitality: it marks sacred boundaries in Shinto architecture, appears in celebratory rituals, and has long been understood to ward off misfortune. At the same time, red flowers in Japanese visual culture carry more ambivalent associations – they are linked to intensity, to parting, and even to mortality.
The Warm House, 2015, watercolour on paper, collage, 71 x 50 cm.
For Imamura, colour is the entry point; the flower itself is the constant. In the design world, flowers are among the most familiar of motifs. They appear endlessly across textiles, paintings, and decorative arts, and are burdened with symbolism: beauty, fragility, and femininity, impermanence. In Imamura’s work, however, flowers are stripped of such associations. They are not metaphors, nor are they illustrative devices. They simply exist.
Imamura’s practice centres almost entirely on the act of drawing flowers. This restriction is deliberate. “My sole theme is drawing flowers,” she says. “My flowers have no meaning.” No matter how carefully rendered, how often repeated or how expansively installed, a flower remains a flower. For Imamura, this absence of meaning is not a negation, but a space of possibility. Emptiness, she suggests, allows the work to remain open – to the maker, to the viewer, and to the environment in which it is encountered.
The Warm House, 2015, watercolour on paper, collage, 73 x 50 cm.
This refusal of symbolism distinguishes her work from much contemporary practice that uses botanical imagery as shorthand for narrative or identity. Imamura’s flowers do not represent something else; they are not vehicles for autobiography or commentary. Instead, they function as quiet presences, inviting a form of looking that is slow, unforced and bodily. In this sense, her work aligns closely with the values of craft and material culture: attention, repetition, and care over explanation.
Although her works often resemble pressed flowers, Imamura does not use real plant material. Her pieces are made from watercolour paintings, cut and collaged into floral forms. Paper, itself a plant- based material, becomes the ground on which imagined flowers take shape. These flowers are intentionally inaccurate. They do not correspond to any botanical species. Imamura is careful to keep them within the realm of “flower” as an idea rather than a scientific object. They remain recognisable and familiar, yet resistant to definition. This approach emerged through process rather than concept. A series of watercolour paintings, densely worked and patterned like textiles or carpets, led her to cut out a single flower. From this act, a technique gradually developed. It is characteristic of Imamura’s practice that the method evolves from doing, rather than being predetermined. Her watercolour works may remain flat or become installations, spreading across walls to form immersive environments, which enables the viewer to move through them rather than simply observe them.
One Red Flower, 2020, watercolour on paper, collage.
What sets Imamura apart, however, is not simply her technique but also her understanding of flowers as belonging to a different order of existence. She speaks of a clear boundary between “this side” – the human world, and “that side,” the world of flowers. On the other side, she senses a place free from anxiety, struggle or self-consciousness. Flowers exist there without question. In recent works, insects have begun to appear alongside them, as she has come to feel that insects, too, belong to that realm.
This sensitivity to the unseen is deeply rooted in Imamura’s personal history and cultural background. She recalls her grandparents’ love of flowers and a garden filled with them; her grandmother’s embroidered cushions and cloths; her mother’s jewellery box, floral crockery, and bookshelves; the bouquets that appeared in picture books; the memory of scent as much as form. These elements are not directly quoted in her work, yet they form its underlying structure. They shape the atmosphere we encounter, even if we cannot name their source.
Two Red Flowers, 2020, watercolour on paper, collage, 120 × 90 cm.
A decisive shift occurred during her university years. “When I was a university student, there was a time when I could no longer draw. That experience led me to realise that I do not truly exist as a singular, fixed entity. I began to re-examine the things that constitute me, and from there I started drawing flowers.” Rather than understanding identity as something fixed and autonomous, she came to see herself as a composite – formed through experiences, objects, and relationships. Then she returned to drawing flowers, not as decoration, but as a means of understanding this dispersed self.
Imamura’s thinking is closely aligned with Japanese cultural attitudes towards presence and absence. Practices such as Obon, which honour ancestral spirits and unseen forces, inform her belief that what matters most in a work of art is not only what is visible. “Art is something that can be seen,” she reflects, “but what is important is the unseen energy that exists within it.” By working with care and attentiveness, she believes that a spirit may come to inhabit a work, much like a tsukumogami – an object that acquires a soul through time and use.
This sense of accumulated presence is especially evident in her installations. When her collaged flowers are arranged across walls, they form environments rather than displays – spaces that feel cultivated rather than composed. Viewers are asked not to interpret them, but to inhabit them, if only briefly.
Fumi Imamura x Comme des Garçons’, Tao collection 2025. Image: Comme des Garçons
Such qualities translated naturally into Imamura’s recent collaboration with Comme des Garçons’ Tao line. Rather than producing new imagery, existing works were selected from her archive. Some originated as installations, others as individual pieces. The textile designs were developed by the Tao line, allowing Imamura’s imagery to take on a new material life without losing its integrity.
One of the floral patterns, printed on black cloth, came from a short-lived installation staged in an old textile hall in Ichinomiya, a space that no longer exists. Another recurring motif, red flowers, derives from a 2015 series titled A Warm House, consisting of 30 works. Created from a desire to wrap herself in red flowers, the series filled her studio’s walls, offering a profound sense of physical reassurance. Colour, repetition, and enclosure worked together to create a bodily experience, rather than a purely visual one.
Red flowers remain central to her current practice. Beyond this, Imamura resists defining a future direction. The images she carries, she explains, are always abstract until they are made. Her surroundings, emotional state, and encounters shape each work as it emerges. She does not see herself as an author imposing meaning, but as a mediator. “It is my painting,” she says, “but it does not belong to me.”
What Imamura ultimately offers is not a new way of depicting flowers but a different relationship to them – and to surface, pattern, and space more broadly. In a world saturated with imagery and explanation, her work makes space for quiet looking. It asks for attention rather than interpretation. She hopes viewers will encounter her flowers as they might notice a bloom while walking through a landscape: pausing, perhaps turning back, but without effort or demand. If the place where her work exists becomes a space of calm, that, for her, is enough.
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Further Information:
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Image Credits:
Lead: Fumi Imamura in her studio. Photo: Norihito Hiraide.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of the artist.