Norihiko Kamei came to flowers through the tea ceremony — and through wagashi, the small confections served at tea gatherings. Precise in form, seasonal by nature, gone within moments of being made. The impermanence was the point. His graduation work at Tokyo Zokei University used confections from the historic Toraya wagashi house as raw material, and the direction he would spend the next decades pursuing was already visible.
The series at the foundation of AME is HANAYAMA — small, dense arrangements of multicolored flowers that read as a single living landscape. After exhibiting the work in fresh flowers in Amsterdam in 2019, Kamei moved to preserved flowers: the only way to share the work across borders, and let it last. From this came the KESHIKIFU line — volcanic pumice stones from Kagoshima planted with preserved botanicals, each paired with a fragrance blended to match the landscape it carries — and the UKIISHI series, in which moss and leaves arranged on stone conceal a small bud vase for a single stem. Each piece is a landscape compressed into something that fits in two hands.
