Japanese artist Makoto Azuma launched a beautiful bouquet and a 50-year-old bonsai tree on a high-altitude balloon 30,000 meters into the atmosphere (about 1/3 of the way to space) to capture a beautiful series of images with Earth’s curvature visible in the background. The project is titled “Exobotanica.” From a CNN interview with Azuma:
When did you realize you wanted to work with natural materials to create art?While I was running a flower shop, putting together bouquets and decoration, I thought I could find a new type of flower by applying a new expression on the flowers themselves. Besides merely making bouquets as presents or table top decoration, I thought it would be possible to capture the beauty in a photograph or video while the flower is changing its shape. It is like slicing out a moment for keeping the beauty eternal…
It took you around six months to prepare for Exobiotanica, one of your most extreme and perhaps best-known projects. Can you tell us a bit about this work?
(Creating) Exobiotanica was a fight against a temperature of minus 60 degree Celsius (-76 degrees Fahrenheit). It is more to show the flowers’ beauty, even in a frozen state or even when they are shattered, rather than how to bloom beautifully. It (the art) went into space, so the body had to be chunky and the structure well cemented. Making just an art object was not a goal at all. I needed to choose flowers that can complete to form a good contrast in space. The piece also needed to have movement and strength.
