The material these works here were made from, was taken from two series of photos of flowers – color and black-and-white – that I made in the past. Different from collages, where miscellaneous things are mixed together in one single work, these are collages that exclusively contain my own previous flower photographs. I started with items from the black-and-white series, which caused in me a strong urge to join the single flowers together. There are no rules for collages, and I wasn’t satisfied by just scattering the flowers around. After all, this is perhaps the way I work in general. At some point in the process, I reverted the color photographs into negative images, and found the resulting color combinations and overall impressions intriguingly refreshing. They reminded me of the films of Kenneth Anger, or 1980s New York underground artists such as Herve Di Rosa, and renewed my awareness that this particular color sensation, which affected my work most profoundly, was still alive inside me. The final result was a trilogy of color, black-and-white and negative (reverse) images of flowers. Different from previous photographs finished with my usual tones, for these series I took an approach that was completely free and without limitations, which turned out to be a joyful and at once also painful operation. At the early stage of the creative process, I feared that I might reach a dead end somewhere along the way, but the more I worked on it, my brain seemed to gradually move into some kind of “zone,” and from there I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. When I look at the results, in some way I feel my own personal character oozing out from them more explicitly compared to straight photography. I dedicate these images to Ryuichi Sakamoto, my life teacher who introduced me to the world of art.

– After words by Tajima Kazunali (a part)