Take a fresh look at the world through the lens of a self-confessed nature-obsessed artist. Asuka Hishiki possesses not only a sense of profound awe and wonder at the intricacies of the natural world, but also the talent to communicate it through her paintings. Recalling the Wunderkammer (literally, ‘wonder rooms’) of 16th and 17th century European collectors, Asuka Hishiki’s Botaniphoria: A Cabinet of Botanical Curiosities encompasses subjects as diverse as rotting vegetables, endangered species, mundane weeds and backyard insects – all treasures to her and transformed into objects of intense and fragile beauty through her skill with watercolour. Her work is held in prestigious collections such as The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, California, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pennsylvania.
One of the first people to appreciate her work said about it, ‘your work is not to hang upon a wall in a bright living room, but to put in a drawer in the study. Then, alone in the middle of the night, to take out and ponder upon.’ In the best traditions of Wunderkammer, this book is an artfully arranged collection intended to be pondered upon. From the interactions of the objects within the paintings, to the quirky choice of subjects and the realism with which they are portrayed, they will bear revisiting again and again. As Asuka admits, painting is her language. She is an extremely adept communicator in it.
Most gardening books are chosen for practical reasons – technical information, specialist plant knowledge, design inspiration, garden history. So it’s rare that I fall in love with a book for its own sake, but I’ve been completely enchanted by this work, which is not ‘for’ anything, except to show us how one painter sees elements of her daily world which many would ignore and finds wonder in odd details. – Rosemary FitzGerald, in The Hardy Plant
Asuka Hishiki. Paperback, 200 x 200 mm, 96 pages, beautiful colour artwork images, May 2023.