From the refined to the revolutionary, find meaning in every bloom.
During the Summer of Love, flowers became powerful symbols of peace, a concept plucked from Buddhist art. More than merely decorative, floral imagery has helped convey ideas from the refined to the revolutionary for thousands of years.
In Asian art, flowers speak a language all their own. Where a lotus blooms, a rosebud is clasped, or cherry blossoms flutter to the ground, a story is told — if you know how to read it.
This summer, uncover the hidden meanings of flowers in Asian art. Delve into the symbolism of six significant blooms: the lotus, plum blossom, cherry blossom, chrysanthemum, tulip, and rose. The enduring importance of these flowers is shared through gloriously gilded screens, sleek lacquers, rare porcelains, striking sculptures, pop art, and sensory-igniting, participatory contemporary installations that speak to today’s issues, from climate change to social activism.
Contemporary Voices
Much art of the past fifty years has been envisioned not as an aesthetically pleasing rendering of the natural world but as a platform for inquiry and an investigation of the difficult and the ugly. How do flowers fit into this? The contemporary works in Flower Power demonstrate the flexibility of floral images to convey both timely and timeless themes. The flowers in these works offer decorative appeal and symbolic values, as well as ways of thinking about a wide range of topics—the natural environment in which we live, the communities we build, and the commodities we buy. Flowers in contemporary art are connected to particular cultural legacies but are also open to new interpretations, moored to the past yet provoking questions about our future.
Meet the Artists
Ayomi Yoshida
Ayomi Yoshida is a fourth-generation printmaker from Japan. She works with a team of volunteers for several weeks to install thousands of woodblock-printed cherry blossoms on two-dimensional images of tree branches.
Lee Mingwei
Born in Taiwan, American artist Lee Mingwei was inspired by Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, which explores the value of creativity and the idea of art as a gift rather than a commodity—a central theme in Lee’s work. In his piece The Moving Garden, Lee does not use renderings or representations but actual fresh-cut flowers.
Takashi Murakami
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami incorporates flowers into many of his artworks. The two silkscreen prints in Flower Power feature his most common floral motif: cartoonish, smiling, polychrome daisies. These flowers are simultaneously decorative symbols of cuteness, peace, and happiness and something more complex—examples of successful branding. Their overabundance of saccharine grinning begs the question of what sinister elements lurk just below the surface in art and life.
teamLab
teamLab is a digital collective of programmers, designers and animator. They use time-based animation to allow the subject matter to grow and flower for the viewers in a way that static art cannot, allowing for an innovative addition to a familiar practice.
Megan Wilson
San Francisco in the 1960s is a significant place and time for artist Megan Wilson. Her parents lived in the city during that period, and their experiences and the era’s counterculture legacy helped define the trajectory of her creative and sociopolitical paths.
Ikebana at the Museum
Ikebana is practiced today in places beyond Japan’s borders. In fact, the Asian Art Museum has a Flower Committee comprising a group of dedicated volunteers—practicing the Sogetsu style of ikebana—who create the dynamic floral arrangements that you see throughout the museum every week. This video features a day in the life of one of the committee teams (featuring Naoko Fujimura and Ricardo Ramirez) as it brings the ancient art of ikebana to the twenty-first century.
Flower Power is organized by the Asian Art Museum. Presentation is made possible with the generous support of Doris Shoong Lee and Theodore Bo Lee, The Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Fund for Excellence in Exhibitions and Presentations, Phoebe Cowles, Warren Felson and Lucy Sun, Cathy and Howard Moreland, and an anonymous donor.
Media sponsors: Wall Street Journal, NBC Bay Area, KQED.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.