Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [window], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [Houghton, Michigan, USA], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
Emma Johnson, Cherry Blossoms [Jena, Germany], 2026. Digital C-Print, 13 x 19 in.
The cherry blossoms (sakura) are a reference to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, where the protagonist Charlotte decorates her hotel room in Tokyo with paper cherry blossom decorations. In Japanese culture, cherry blossoms represent ephemeralness. This relates to both the ephemeralness of the economy and its cyclical nature, precarity reimagined as a beautiful shifting state. The transient spring beginnings of the cherry blossoms also coincide with the fiscal year in Japan. In this way, nature and economy are linked through aesthetics. This ephemeral, cyclical nature of the cherry blossom directly relates with neoliberal loops, because they share these ethereal and reoccurring properties.
Yet, the cherry blossoms’ reminder that life is fleeting also works in opposition with the way neoliberalism is mythologized in American society. Neoliberalism hides death (the necrocene) under a culture of able-bodied healthiness that denies the existence of death, the ultimate end of the cycle. Or, viewed in another way, the cycle’s beginning.
– Emma C. Johnson, 2026
Works referenced
Jill H. Casid, “Necrolandscaping,” Natura: environmental aesthetics after landscape, ed. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, Dayron Carillo Morell (2018): 237-64.
Coppola, Sofia, dir. 2003. Lost in Translation. United States: Focus Features.
Takeda, Erina. “Significance of Sakura: Cherry Blossom Traditions in Japan,” Smithsonian Institution, April 8, 2014, https://festival.si.edu/blog/2014/significance-of-sakura-cherry-blossom-traditions-in-japan
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