HANAMI AOYAMA

Keith NG
HANAMI AOYAMA

Photographs: Keith NG

Publisher: Leftover Press

76 pages

Year: 2012

ISBN: 9780988037700

Price: 30 €

Comments: Hardcover, 24,9 x 18,3cm, color photographs. In very good condition other than edge wear at the bottom left corner of the spine. Here it is a SAMPLE copy (otherwise the book is limited to 500 signed copies).

The title, Hanami | Aoyama 花見青山, refers to the tradition of hanami - literally "flower viewing", where people gather and celebrate under cherry trees during blossom season, engaging in festive meals and bouts of drinking. Sakura (cherry blossoms), due to their relatively short lifespan, are seen to symbolise the fleeting nature of life, and often planted in cemeteries. This book is set in Aoyama Cemetery, which was a popular destination for such parties. But as the drinking and festivities overwhelmed the peacefulness of the cemetery, parties were outlawed in 2009.

Immediately after the events of 3/11, the airwaves were inundated with tragic imagery of death and misery. For the Japanese people, the terms of life and death had fundamentally shifted. Keith Ng explains, about the photographs in the books, which were taken between 2005 and 2012: "I began to look over those photographs as a way of reflecting on these shifts, and to both re-discover and reframe how death gives shape to the meaning of life outside the sphere of incomprehensible'.