At The Shiseido Karakusa: Original Designs & Drawings, we created an installation with the theme “A New Karakusa.”
Shiseido’s name comes from a passage of the Yi Jing: “Praise the virtues of the Earth, which nurtures new life and brings forth significant values.” With this as our base, we presented a “Forest which Nurtures New Life and Brings forth Significant Values” using a video (“Photosynthesis”) of the creation of a karakusa pattern that took Tokyo’s changing environment (the amount of sunshine, rainfall, CO2 emission levels, urban congestion) as its inputs, and a three-dimensional work (“Re-Tree”) that took scrap wood from the product package manufacturing process and gave it new life as a “tree.”

The karakusa pattern in the video piece embraces plants as a blessing of nature and mimics their growth. However, when it’s turned over, the impacts of human activity on nature are also reflected, starting with the continuing increase in carbon-dioxide concentration levels.
We expressed reverence for nature through this karakusa by growing it with the life force of things that had already played their role and things that people regarded as useless.