spring flowers, hope, and new beginnings

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Apr 26, 2025

Hello there! That last trilogy of blog posts was dense and serious, haha, so let’s keep the next few light and fun—for both you and me. 😂

Spring has finally hit Tokyo in the last few weeks, and cherry blossoms have been blooming all over the city. There’s a sensation of excitement and frenetic energy that take over Tokyo during this time, and 花見 (or, “flower viewing” where people picnic under the cherry blossoms to appreciate the flowers…or in most cases drink and be merry) is happening every day in every park I pass. It’s probably my favorite time of the year to be in Tokyo.

I equate it to summer evenings in New York City, when everyone is out and about and catching up with friends and family and being merrily rowdy. It makes me so happy to be alive.

It was definitely hard to concentrate on work with the days finally being so sunny and beautiful, and I definitely snuck long breaks many of the afternoons. 😆

Close-up of pale pink sakura (cherry blossoms) in full bloom, with delicate petals softly lit by sunlight.

Bright pink cherry blossoms and buds on a branch, set against a blurred background of similar blooms in a park.

A cascade of pink cherry blossoms overhanging a river, softly backlit by the sun reflecting off the water.

To me, cherry blossoms are deeply nostalgic. I still remember a street lined with cherry blossoms as far as I could see from my childhood in the Japanese countryside, but then we moved to America when I was ten years old and it took me almost two decades to get the timing just right to see them again. And when I finally got to see them in my adulthood, I was indescribably moved to almost tears. They were as beautiful in my adulthood as they were in my memory.

I’ve loved flowers since my favorite aunt gifted me an art book of how to draw flowers when I was five years old. I’ve always included them in my work, even back in my high school years, but I never realized why I gravitated to them or what they meant to me until very recently.

An original ink sketch showing the floral and fruit design for “Wonderland,” composed of various botanical elements within a gridded frame.

A carved linoleum block featuring an intricate floral and fruit composition segmented into grid-like squares.

A colorful linocut print titled “Wonderland,” depicting lemons, daffodils, and other flowers within a stylized grid layout.

A linoleum carving of fruits and flowers that I made in high school. I still remember carving the linoleum for weeks straight in the cold morning. (I took art independent study at 7a.m. my junior year because I couldn’t fit it in my regular school schedule. 😂) I’d work until my hands cramped up (you can tell where I finally gave up on the bottom, hahaha), but I loved how meditative and therapeutic it was. For better or worse I was an overachiever in high school, so to have this one hour every morning where I thought about nothing—it felt sacred. This print actually won a Scholastic art competition for California state and even went to Nationals, but lost there. 😅

It turns out, flowers to me symbolize hope and the mark of new beginnings. Here are three past projects that feature them:

wonder & hope

In 2022, I got to have my first solo art show in New York City. I decided to tell a story about the sense of wonder I used to feel being outside, and how I lost that feeling during the pandemic as I read story after story about Asians being physically assaulted as they went about their daily lives . When I realized how scared I was to be outside in March 2022, I decided to investigate that feeling and tell the story through 21,000 photos I took between 2018 and 2022.

As part of that process, I decided to manually categorize each photo under a broad category (I had learned during a previous project that I take a lot of food photos, so I thought it’d be hilarious to include food as one category). What I hadn’t expected was how many flower photos I’d come across, especially during March and April of 2018, the first time I got to see cherry blossoms in almost two decades. As I tagged each flower photo, I felt the original joy I’d felt when I took that photo.

This is why I’m more and more a fan of taking it slow with my data, to spend as much time as I can with them. I’m a fan of Stefanie Posavec’s 2022 eyeo talk (“You’re Doing It ‘Wrong’”) where she claimed that her primary focus with data projects is collecting and understanding the data, and that the resulting visualization is merely the artifact that comes out of that process. Sometimes I learn a lot about myself when I dive deep into a dataset.

After that process of tagging thousands of photos, I forced myself to look up and around whenever I was outside to try and find joy around me. And one cloudy April morning, I looked up and saw the first blooms of spring. It brought a smile to my lips, the first feeling of joy I felt outside since the pandemic had taken over the world two years earlier, and I was overcome with hope.

A close-up of a circular data visualization, with colorful dots representing photos taken near and far from home. Text on the transparent layer reads, “each dot represents a photo, positioned by where I took it.”

Each dot represents a photo I took between 2018 and 2022, positioned by where I was when I took the photo (the further from center, the further from home). I projected the visualization onto water in a bowl, and programmatically dripped water according to the number of Covid cases in that same week. The distortion of the water surface and visualization is a reflection of how distorted reality felt at that time.

The centerpiece of the show, titled wonder, was a projection of the main data visualization onto a bowl of water. Drips of water (mapped to the number of Covid cases) distorted the water surface and the visualization. On either side of this centerpiece were nine circular data visualizations of my photos, each representing a different month.

But there is a subtle second piece, titled hope, a set of nine flowers suspended above the circular data visualizations, that glowed every time someone passed underneath. A personal reminder that joy and hope is all around, as long as I choose to look up.

Three glowing, flower-like light sculptures hang from the ceiling against a pale purple-lit wall in a gallery setting.

Close-up of a single illuminated flower-shaped light sculpture with soft, translucent petals glowing with a cool white-blue hue.

A person in a winter coat photographs hanging illuminated flower sculptures in a dimly lit gallery space.

Each flower represents a week of flower photos, its size mapped to the number of flower photos in that week. They were suspended over visitors’ heads, positioned in the room next to the corresponding months in the circular visuals.

A softly glowing flower-shaped light fixture suspended from the ceiling, with warm purple-pink ambient lighting in the background.

film flowers

For my very first “Data Sketches” project, I wanted to do something related to summer (as the month was July and the topic was movies). I had sketched a few different ideas that reminded me of summer, like fireworks and sunflowers, and ultimately decided on sunflowers because I could actually implement them from a technical perspective. 😂

Sketchbook page with colorful hand-drawn fireworks and annotations for a data visualization concept mapping summer movies to fireworks based on ratings and genre.

Sketchbook page with drawings of multicolored flowers representing movie data, where petals encode genre and ratings, and leaves mark whether the movie was seen.

“Data Sketches” was a collaborative project that I completed with fellow data designer—and friend!—Nadieh Bremer. Each month we would choose a topic and create a visual that we would then share with each other. It started as a way to push ourselves creatively and try new tools and approaches but it culminated into a book, _Data Sketches,_ that describes the creative process behind each of our 24 visuals.

Let me not pretend that I had some deep intellectual reason for why I chose flowers. 😂 I chose them because I wanted to learn SVG paths, which would allow me to combine lines to create unique “polyline” shapes. Flower petals, with their complexity and layers, were a great test case. This project unlocked so much for me technically (I became able to draw on screen any shape I imagined), but it also became one of my more recognizable projects — one that people still know me by. (Because who else would have combined movie data with flowers? Probably very few people, because I really wasn’t thinking too hard when I did it, hahaha.)

The final piece. Each summer blockbuster is represented as a flower, and the four different petal shapes and five different colors encode age-appropriateness rating and genre(s), respectively. The number of petals represents the film’s popularity (in IMDB votes) and the size of the flower is its IMDB rating out of 10.

Grid-style graphic titled 'film flowers', depicting top summer blockbuster movies as stylized, colorful flower icons, organized by year and encoded by genre and rating.

Send Me Love

In 2017, SFMOMA launched a program called “Send Me SFMOMA” where people would text a request (“send me love,” “send me hope,” “send me smiles,” etc.) and the museum would reply with an image of a piece of art in its collection that best matched the keyword. The museum received 5 million texts from hundreds of thousands of individuals in the first few months.

In 2018, SFMOMA commissioned me to “do something” with this huge dataset, and I ultimately chose to visualize five “power users” who sent hundreds of requests over the course of the first week. For weeks, I felt lost about what visual I could use; my original idea of using a watercolor effect (with each request being a “brushstroke” and the color being the dominant color in the artwork) was generating unaesthetic, chaotic results.

Abstract watercolor-like blotch in muted tones, blending grays, greens, and hints of pink and orange, resembling a dense cloud of color.

Fragment of a chaotic, vibrant watercolor-like composition filled with pixel-like splotches of varied colors forming a noisy texture.

And then cherry blossom season hit Tokyo (and much like this year) I spent two weeks mostly outside. And I was so inspired that I pitched my client this new idea where each text would be represented by a flower—and being an art museum that encouraged artistic expression, they said, sure!

Each tree, representing an individual’s interaction with SFMOMA throughout a day, grows each time the person sent a request via text. With each text, a new leaf or flower appears on the tree. The shape of this growth represents the “mood” of the request (positive, neutral, or negative), while the color(s) represent the dominant colors of the artwork.

It was the most creative freedom I’ve ever had working on a client project, and the first time I saw a very realistic possibility of making my childhood dream of becoming an artist come true—but with code and technology instead of with paint and brushes like I’d originally imagined at four years old.

To me, the flowers in this project represent possibility, the mark of a new beginning.

—

It’s been a year since I established my Tokyo company to enable my art practice, and half a year since we’ve settled into our Tokyo apartment and started this bi-coastal (bi-Pacific?) experiment. I just started a printmaking studio residency this month, and will be having my first Tokyo solo art show later this fall! (More on this in a later post.) 🎊

It’s been stressful, overwhelming, and at times exceedingly frustrating. But I have nothing to complain about, because everyday I’m just so grateful that I finally have the resources and courage to pursue what I’ve always dreamed of: To be an artist.

So cheers to hope, and new beginnings. Thank you for being part of this adventure.

P.S. The world continues to be chaotic, stressful, frightening, and frustrating. I hope you’re doing ok. 🙏