In “Living Flowers,” curator Karen Higa has placed ikebana beside the work of top-drawer European and American contemporary artists, as if to suggest that the one’s distinct and historically-rooted sense of craft might begin to inform the other’s cultural capital, and vice-versa. At the level of formal structure, there are obvious affinities between the flowers and the art objects: The treatment of a small space as a kind of compositional universe so essential to ikebana finds correlates in Manfred Pernice’s architectural assemblage and Gabriel Orozco’s sensibility of cerebral geometry.

These are the kind of depoliticized relationships that the exhibition seems to celebrate and find meaning within. It is, after all, first and foremost a sensuous experience. The flowers perfume the galleries, which in turn have been enwrapped with curtain-like planes of crinkled paper (an allusion to yet another Japanese craft tradition, compliments of exhibition designers Escher GuneWardena Architects). It is, in other words, an aesthetically-minded exhibition, and this is certainly not inherently problematic. But, as is perhaps only appropriate given its institutional setting, “Living Flowers” is ultimately a political—or at least sociological—project. Anytime a discipline (ikebana, i.e.) not generally considered capital-A art is placed beside commodities defined by that very distinction, one is forced to think about the relationship between creative labor and the market economy. And anytime Japanese tradition addresses the West in such a confined space, politics must not be far behind.