Shiro Kuramata

The Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata (b. 1934, Tokyo – d. 1991, Tokyo) is best known for his membership of Memphis, a group of postmodern designers founded by Ettore Sottsass. He created the vase Ephemera in 1989 especially for a solo exhibition in the Galerie Yves Gastou in Paris. Made of acrylic resin, glass and aluminium, these vases are a homage to the Japanese tradition of floral arrangement, which is here reduced to a single flower. The elegant lines of their form, whose minimalism derives from the purified simplicity of Japanese culture, seem almost to evoke a human figure seemingly absorbed in meditation.