White flower-shaped lights sit among leaves, while a column carries an enlarged flower with fine pink filaments. In YouRuMaru’s release images, plants appear indoors as both constructed objects and photographs. LIGHT ART 2026–2027, due to open in Okinawa in November, does more than illuminate flowers. It translates blooms with different seasons and durations into the materials of light.
Making a night flower from lines of light
For the exhibition announced by Oriental Hotel Okinawa Resort & Spa, sagaribana flowers will be represented with LED fiber lights and artificial flowers. A bloom that opens on summer nights and falls the following morning becomes a light rather than a flowering plant. The plan also includes queen-of-the-night forms with mirrored petals. Both refer to night-blooming flowers, but one works through luminous strands and the other through surfaces that catch light.
In the overall release image, hanging clusters of white light at the upper left face a floral photograph wrapped around a column on the right. Dark leaves separate the individual luminous strands; the photograph retains the flower’s transition from pale pink to white. Rather than a single enlarged model, the scene places two approaches together: reconstructing a form and enlarging its recorded image.
The statement for THE FLEETING BLOOM, whose subject is sagaribana, draws attention to brief flowering and connections between living things. Yet turning a flower into a light cannot preserve the event of its falling after one night. The more available the constructed form becomes, the clearer its difference from a plant that may not flower when we wish to see it. The work seems to make that distance visible rather than remove it.
The lines inside an iju petal
A close-up of the white flower-shaped light shows fine lines running through five rounded sections, with smaller forms spreading from the center. Against dark leaves, the petal-like surfaces appear translucent. Their edges and inner lines retain a sense of construction even as they suggest the thinness of petals. The announcement identifies iju as the flower behind this light.
YouRuMaru is the art collective of Suguru Funaki and Rie Sumi, and iju is a continuing subject. The artists’ archive records Iju Flower Chandelier at the same hotel for Yambaru Art Festival 2022–2023, followed by Iju Flower Vortex — Connecting All Life for the 2023–2024 edition. The recorded sizes are 2.3 meters and 7 meters respectively. Both list stainless steel, hologram film, resin and spotlights among their materials.
The two earlier works reveal a sustained interest in translating flowers into lighting and spatial scale. A chandelier and a vortex that can be experienced from within establish different relationships with the viewer. Returning to the light among the leaves in the new announcement, the fine lines inside its petal-like forms instead invite close attention. Iju becomes more than a decorative motif: it helps establish the distance between viewer and work.
A flower photograph at the scale of a column
For the new plan, the artists traveled to Okinawa during flowering, photographed plants and printed the images on fabric to wrap around columns. Lit from within, a photograph becomes part of the column rather than a flat picture hung on a wall. In the overall image, floral details spread across a surface taller than a person, with further plant images continuing onto columns behind it.
Instead of asking us to move closer to a small flower, the flower approaches the dimensions of the building. The constructed lights select aspects of its shape; the photographs bring in color and detail. Together they reveal a difference between decorating with plants and changing how plants are seen. What first looks like an interior arrangement can also be understood as an adjustment of scale.
LIGHT ART 2026–2027 YouRuMaru is planned for November 20, 2026, through February 28, 2027, at the hotel in Nago, Okinawa. Iju associated with the rainy season and summer-blooming sagaribana will share a space as light forms. These are not flowers induced to bloom in winter, but images carried out of their separate seasons. A small flower-shaped light among leaves and a photograph covering a column offer two different distances from which to look.