The Encyclopedia of Flowers IV

"The Encyclopedia of Flowers IV" arrived ten years into Azuma Makoto and Shunsuke Shiinoki's running catalogue of the flower market, by then a series that had sold some 40,000 copies.

Seigensha published this 472-page paperback in Japan in 2019, again designed by Kenya Hara, here working with Kaoru Matsuno and Yumi Kitamura. Where earlier volumes tracked the flowers and, in the third, the wider world around them, this one turns to the relationship between flowers and people themselves: the long, cross-cultural habit of offering a flower to another person. The book itself is framed as an act of giving: flowers, and the volume that holds them, offered to everyone who opens it.

Azuma and Shiinoki have worked together since 2000, when they opened the Tokyo flower shop Jardins des Fleurs. Azuma began exhibiting his Botanical Sculpture installations around 2005, and the pair founded the experimental collective AMKK in 2009. The series they began with "The Encyclopedia of Flowers" continued past this volume with further installments tracking the same flower market over time.