Jean Michel Othoniel’s luminous garden blooms in Kyoto

Jean Michel Othoniel has constructed a luminous terrain of his own imagining at Perrotin’s booth at Art Collaboration Kyoto. Titled ‘In the Garden of Love’, the installation unfolds as a meditation on material and sensory experience, where hand blown glass, cast aluminium and water move through a carefully orchestrated dialogue.

The floor itself becomes a landscape: a vast sea of pink glass bricks, their translucent surfaces catching and diffusing light across the immaculate gallery floor. From this foundation rise three slender towers of brick, each topped with a delicate glass fountain. Between and above them float cast aluminium sakura flowers crowned in gold leaf, their petals catching the gallery’s clean overhead light with quiet radiance.

Othoniel’s practice has long moved between the ethereal and the tactile. Hand blown glass elements, wooden beads and architectural forms combine here to create what reads as an imaginary garden, though one constructed from materials that suggest both fragility and permanence. The gentle acoustic presence of flowing water becomes another voice in the composition, its quiet murmur encouraging visitors to slow and settle within the space.

The work presents itself for the first time in this configuration, a new series shaped specifically for this moment and place. The artist’s sensitivity to how light moves through glass, how shadow pools on brick, how water catches and reflects, transforms the booth into something approaching the sacred. The pink bricks themselves seem to glow from within, while the golden sakura flowers hold their own luminescence against the white walls.

Perrotin’s booth KM11 at Art Collaboration Kyoto runs through November 9.

Imagery courtesy of Perrotin (@perrotin).