Sakura saku (Cherry Blossoms Are Blooming)

A site-specific installation at Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, presented under the title 桜咲く (cherry blossoms are blooming). The piece responds to a gallery devoted to the Victorian painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts and his Arts and Crafts setting, placing Japanese mokuhanga imagery within a 19th-century British aesthetic context that was itself shaped by Japonisme. The blossom subject draws on the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) tradition and on the seasonal vocabulary of Edo-period printmaking, where [sakura](/glossary/sakura) compositions structured the calendar of [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) and [triptych](/glossary/triptych) views. Installations of this kind typically use woodblock-printed sheets of [washi](/glossary/washi), often suspended at multiple heights, so that the cumulative effect echoes the experience of standing beneath a flowering tree rather than facing a framed print. For Imada, who has spent more than two decades teaching and demonstrating traditional Japanese printmaking in the UK, the Watts setting is both a historical and contemporary venue—an Arts and Crafts site re-engaged through living mokuhanga practice.