Posted Monday, November 15, 2004; 21:00 HKT
If it's May and you're in Tokyo, then rejoice. A 400-m stretch of the city's most fashionable boulevard, Omotesando, is transformed that month each year into a sculptural display that gladdens the eye and catches the breath with its audacity. The artists are practitioners of ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging. Their materials are pussy-willow branches, wood chips, bamboo and foliage. And their larger-than-life installations are spectacular.

This show, and another in late October, are organized by Sogetsu, one of Japan's premier ikebana schools. Sogetsu's principal, Akane Teshigahara, has made a biannual habit of yanking ikebana out of its usual haunts—musty living rooms, department-store exhibits—and putting it where it can't be ignored. "When pieces are displayed inside, the focus is on 'looking.' But there are no boundaries outdoors," she says. "The viewer feels liberated, they feel closer to the work. They want to approach it and touch it."

In the fall, Sogetsu's event is hosted in Tokyo's western Showa Kinen Park, and comprises even larger, earth-toned installations built in and around the park's lakes, fountains and slopes. Participants use branches and pieces of plants pruned from the surrounding greenery, fashioning impromptu sculptures that many children love to crawl through and scramble over. Who says "public art" has to mean a statue of a long-forgotten municipal figure or a hunk of modernist metal gathering pigeon droppings in a concrete square?

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October 11, 2004	July 26 - August 2, 2004	April 26, 2004