Iris No 133 — 花菖蒲 No 133

The one hundred thirty-third iris by Sugiura Kazutoshi is a companion to its immediate neighbor in the series, the two works sharing many formal decisions while diverging in the specifics of color and arrangement. At this stage in his long project, Sugiura had accumulated enough experience with the hana-shōbu as subject that he could make extremely subtle decisions — small adjustments in the angle of a petal, the saturation of a color, the density of the gold ground — that produced significantly different emotional registers across what might otherwise seem like nearly identical compositions.