Oki Sato’s "Ame Nochi Hana"
Named “Ame Nochi Hana”, which translates into “rain flowers”, this exhibition was imagined by Nendo Studio and led by Japanese artist, Oki Sato. Sato invites the audience to stop for a moment, to contemplate two natural phenomenon’s poetry: rain and flowers blooming. This new exhibition carries on a tradition going back more than 150 years with Aristide Boucicaut, founder of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. Indeed, Oki Sato comes after other contemporary artists such as Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Leandro Erlich and Joana Vasconcelos to take control of Le Bon Marché’s main space.
For this fifth edition, Studio Nendo got a wild card to create spectacular and poetic artistic installations between these famous Parisian walls, mixing together different techniques from craftsmanship to 3D printing. Following Oki Sato’s very minimalist and light style, “Ame Nochi Hana” takes you by the hand into a journey through rain and flowers blooming.
Studio Nendo highlights these manifestations of life. Just like a naturalist dream, Oki Sato orchestrated four oneiric installations around rain and blooming flowers. Each one of them explores the connection and correlation between those two universal elements. The “rain flowers” he imagined are filled with joy and life, they are the common thread throughout the exhibition, as an open door on nature’s beauty. Finally, with this wild card, contemporary artist Oki Sato focused on his unique creativity playing with art boundaries, architecture and design, borrowing something to each different craftsmanship to sublime one of the oldest places where art meets the public for free in Paris.
Words by Alexa Bouhelier-Ruelle
Photos provided by Le Bon Marché
