World Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan Ikenobo Ikebana Exhibition “Transition”

Ikenobo Headquarters will open a Floral Exhibition for the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, Japan titled “Transition.”

Ikebana, one of Japan’s great cultural traditions.
Ikenobo, the origin of Ikebana, presents an exhibition of masterful works.

Continuing from the Muromachi Period to today, we present a series of works showing the “Transitions of ikebana.”

We plan to display a grand style large arrangement as well as works incorporating flowers and technology.

Ikebana is the one and only traditional art that “faces and engages with life itself.” Ikebana takes the lives of plants and their inherent beauty, and finds the best way to arrange them with help from human technique and skill. This way we can enhance that beautiful life to its utmost beauty. 

In Ikenobo we believe that there is beauty in every stage of a plant’s life. 

We use not only at flowers in full bloom, but also buds, leaves bitten by insects, and withering leaves to bring forth and express the beauty of life in all its forms. This describes not only the mindset of our arrangements but our philosophy as well.

we hope you feel the our hope for the future we have entrusted to these flowers.

Contributing Artists:

①Large Arrangement: Headmaster Designate Senko Ikenobo
②Tatehana:

First half: Senshu Ikenobo, Youth Association Leader

Second half: Katsuyuki Higashi, Professor Extraordinary
③Classical Rikka:

First half: Professor Haruka Nishida

Second Half: Assistant Professor Kuniyoshi Tsuchida
④Shōka Shōfūtai:

First half: Assistant Instructor Kiyoshi Imagawa

Second Half: Assistant Instructor Yūsuke Takabayashi 
⑤Free Style: Professor Manabu Noda
⑥Shōka Shinpūtai: Special Contract Instructor Makoto Fujii 
⑦Rikka Shinpūtai: Instructor Daiji Miura
⑧Ōsunanomono: Instructor Noriyoshi Shimazu
⑨Installation: Assistant Professor Kuniyoshi Tsuchida and student volunteers

Messages from our Business Partners:

Konica Minolta Japan

We are extremely grateful to have made a connection with Ikenobo for this event. 
We at Konica Minolta have created a Marketing Team called “BAUMX” (read: Baum Cross) founded on our long cultivated Visual Communication Technology to create experientially valuable spaces. 
It is our pleasure to contribute to fusing Japan’s traditional art of ikebana with science to create a new spatial experience. We offer our hope for even greater things for ikebana to come. 

BAUMX website (Japanese)

MagnaRecta Inc.

“130 (One Thirty)” aims to make products and artworks that maintain their meaning and value by utilizing our core revolutionary modular frame technology. We believe that our sustainable approach, in which the materials themselves are deconstructed and remade into new materials while maintaining the essence and sense of beauty contained in the works, is our way of responding to the spirit and attitude inherited through the traditional art of ikebana.

The ephemerality and vitality that Ikenobo expresses through flowers is not mere decoration, but leaves a deep impression and value on people’s hearts. On the other hand, 130 products have a mechanism for upcycling without compromising the meaning of the work itself, while ensuring its physical cyclicality. In this collaboration, we hoped to support the essential themes of ikebana, “life” and “cycles,” with our technology in the form of a flower stand, and present its ephemeral nature and permanence at the same time. 

Ikebana’s fleeting beauty and 130’s pursuit of sustainable manufacturing based on the premise of cyclicality resonate with each other. We hope that the resonance of these two elements will provide an opportunity for visitors to experience the “future of tradition” at the Osaka Expo.

130 (One Thirty) Website (English and Japanese)

enigma Inc.

Our company has until now made it our work to contribute to the development of the culture of art by supporting contemporary artists.

We are very excited that now we have the chance to collaborate on the meeting of both Japanese traditional art and digital art, two very different fields. 
We hope to expand the new possibilities of traditional culture and to encourage more people to experience the beauty of art.

◆World Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai and Ikenobo, the Origin of Ikebana Related Projects:

In the Kansai Pavilion at the World Expo there will be a special performance by the Ikenoboys at the South Pop up Stage on April 19th in the Kyoto Zone “Ichi-za Kyoto.”

Ichi-za Kyoto will be open from April 13th to April 19th.
We hope you come to see it as well.