Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossom
Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossom
“The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty and life and death. They’re extreme—there’s something almost tacky about them. Like Jackson Pollock twisted by love. They’re decorative but taken from nature. They’re about desire and how we process the things around us and what we turn them into, but also about the insane visual transience of beauty—a tree in full crazy blossom against a clear sky. It’s been so good to make them, to be completely lost in colour and in paint in my studio. They’re garish and messy and fragile and about me moving away from Minimalism and the idea of an imaginary mechanical painter and that’s so exciting for me.”
- – Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms is a continuation of his career-long investigation into painting. The artist reinterprets, with playful irony, the traditional subject of landscape painting as well as the great artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Impressionism to Action Painting.
HENI Leviathan released a set of eight cherry blossom prints in 2021 by Damien Hirst, The Virtues, published by HENI Editions. The eight prints were each titled after one of The Eight Virtues of Bushidō according to Nitobe Inazō – Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honour, Loyalty, Control.
In 1900 Nitobe Inazō published a book, Bushidō: The Soul of Japan, which narrates for Western audiences the samurai code of ethics known as Bushidō. According to Nitobe, Bushidō literally translates to ‘Military-Knight-Ways’ and lists the ways in which fighting Japanese nobles were expected to maintain themselves in their daily and vocational lives. In Nitobe’s account this code is divided into eight virtues, which are responsible for customs such as the tea ceremony and behaviour like tranquillity even in the face of danger. Nitobe has stated his intention was to unveil the cultural similarities between Japan and the West, effectively concluding ‘that there are no East or West as far as human beings are concerned’.