tulip mania

kumi hiroi

9 April 2022 - 14 May 2022

Opening Saturday 9 April 15.00 – 18.00 hours! Introduction by Saskia Albrecht, garden architect and founder Tulp festival Amsterdam

Mankind is drawn to the beauty of flowers, and this notion spurred artist and designer Kumi Hiroi into thinking. For ‘Tulip Mania’, she investigated whether the beauty and emotions of the flowers justify the environmental problems they cause. She looked at how tulips travel from bulbs in the ground to flowers in the vase. Tulip bulbs have been perfectly adapted over the years to suit people’s convenience and desires. Tulips are grown all over the world, but especially in the Netherlands. The bulbs — which lead to one of the first speculative bubbles in the 17th century, the so-called “tulip mania” — have been traded with many countries throughout history, including Japan. During the tulip mania, a rare tulip bulb exceeded the price of an Amsterdam canal house. Now a tulip bulb costs just 20 cents.

Kumi Hiroi is a Japanese artist based in the Netherlands, who explores the relationship between people and their environment. She researches the adjustments people make in nature for their own comfort and benefit. Her imaginative approach is combined with detailed research and fieldwork to make the unique cultural history of specific regions tangible. In the exhibition ‘Tulip Mania’ — consisting of colourful textile pieces, texts, photographs and glass sculptures — Hiroi reveals the complexity of the relationship between humans and tulips in our society. By connecting individual stories with the history of the tulip industry in Japan and the Netherlands, she exposes how human greed can have disastrous consequences for the climate and our habitat.

As part of Tulip Mania, Sacha Bronwasser wrote a short story titled Catafalque, which will be presented during Kumi Hiroi’s solo show.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Tulp Festival Amsterdam. Every year in April a wealth of tulips can be admired in the city, and this year Bradwolff Projects is one of the many festival locations to showcase the tulip in the city.

Kumi Hiroi (1979, Gifu, JP) lives and works in Amsterdam, NL. Studied Economics at Saitama University in Japan and then Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. Hiroi was part of several group exhibitions at: Depot BG, Amsterdam (NL), Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (JP). Her works, Pearl Silhouet and Remodeling, have been exhibited at IMA Gallery, Tokyo, (JP), Nagasaki Prefectural Museum, Nagasaki, (JP), Melkweg Expo, Amsterdam, (NL), Maison/ by Teruhiro Yanagihara, Osaka (JP).