Tropical Garden: a Japanese photographer in Ubud, Bali

Tropical Garden is a series of still-life photographs of tropical plants by the Japanese photographer Ikki Mitsuhashi (三橋一樹). It began in 2003, during three months he spent in Ubud, in the hills of central Bali, and it is the series from which every print on this site is made.

What is Tropical Garden?

Each picture is a single arrangement against a plain, pale wall: a lotus leaf held up on a white column like a parasol, a banana flower opening above one dark leaf, young coconuts crowning a grey pillar, calla lilies lying across a frosted-glass sphere. The plants are real. The arrangements are his. He has called them plants of his own invention — flowers, leaves and fruit that grow nowhere but in the tropical forest of his imagination.

They are not documents of a place. There is no landscape in them, no horizon and no people. What they carry from the tropics is the plants themselves, and a certain heat in the colour.

Ubud, 2003

In 2003 Mitsuhashi stayed in Ubud for three months, and came back with what he described as a new vision: Tropical Garden. He was fifty-nine, a photographer for more than thirty years, and before that an art director in Tokyo advertising.

Ubud has drawn artists from abroad for almost a century. The German painter Walter Spies settled there in the late 1920s, and in 1936 the Pita Maha artists' association was founded there with the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet and the prince of Ubud, Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati. The town is still a centre of Balinese painting, carving and craft.

Walk through it and you meet several of the plants in these pictures. Lotus fills the pond before Pura Taman Saraswati, the water temple in the middle of the town. Frangipani flowers — plumeria, called *jepun* in Bali — are laid in the small daily offerings of palm leaf. Coconut and banana are everywhere, in gardens, at the roadside and in the offerings themselves.

Made in Bali, and in the studio

Tropical Garden was not made in one place. Some of the photographs were taken in Bali; others were made later in his studio in Japan, a family house that served for many years as the place where he worked. Which picture was made where is not recorded, and so on this site no single work is labelled with a place — the series as a whole belongs to both.

In the studio the method is the same as in the pictures: a vessel, a plant, a wall and light. The vessels recur across the series — tall white cylinders, grey and sand-coloured stoneware, frosted glass bottles and spheres — so that the plants can be seen against something that does not compete with them.

The plants in the pictures

Among the works on this site:

Lotus — Parasol, Two Lotus Leaves and Bud & Stoneware
Banana flower — The Banana Flower, with its young fruit already forming
Coconut — Held Aloft
Jackfruit and plumeria (frangipani) — Weight and Bloom
Shell ginger — Along the Leaf
Tradescantia — Tradescantia & Celadon
Calla lily — On the Sphere
Tropical fig, in colour and in black and white — Foliage, Colour and Foliage, Monochrome

Not every plant in the series is tropical: tulips and anemones appear too, in When the Flower Bows and Leaning Together. The garden is his, and it admits what he chooses.

From 2005 to this site

In 2005 Mitsuhashi signed with the art company APJ for Tropical Garden. Through the 2000s the prints were sold through Art Gallery Closet in Tokyo and privately, and he kept a ledger of every numbered print by hand. The editions on this site continue that ledger rather than restart it — how to read an edition number explains how.

The first public online release, Tropical Garden B, is on the collection page, in colour and in monochrome. Each work has a short text beside it; three are the artist's own, and the rest are marked as studio drafts awaiting his approval.