I first discovered Tambi Flower the same way many people probably do: in the middle of a late-night scroll through Instagram. His reels appeared on my feed — quick, stylish clips of him making arrangements where he transformed individual plants into sensuous bouquets and sculptures. The edits were sharp and snappy, often synced perfectly to the background music. He never spoke, never narrated. Instead, the camera watched as he trimmed stems with swift confidence, doused flowers in water with a satisfying splash, then assembled everything with a calm precision that felt almost surgical.
Noa Sakamoto, the mind and floral artist behind Tambi Flower, always looks incredibly chic on-screen. Sometimes he wears a leather jacket inside the studio. Other days, it’ll be a carefully tied silk scarf or a beret that makes him look more like a young artist in a Paris atelier than a florist in Hyogo. It’s clear he has an eye not only for flowers, but for atmosphere and storytelling, too.
After watching enough of his reels, curiosity got the better of me. Two years ago, I decided to commission a bouquet from him in honor of a loved one’s graduation in Osaka. He replied with warmth, and when pickup day arrived, I made my way to his studio, curious to see how this digital world of flowers translated in real life.
Room To Bloom
Tambi Flower is tucked inside an unassuming building in the Koshienguchi district of Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture — the kind of neighborhood where university students bike to class and local mom-and-pop shops buzz quietly in the afternoon. It didn’t look like the sort of place where an artist with hundreds of thousands of Instagram views would be working.
When I pushed open the door, the space felt like a compact, slightly chaotic little laboratory of living things. Concrete walls and floors kept everything cool and grounded, while metal shelves overflowed with flowers: waxy tropicals, slender branches, velvety petals and long-limbed stems that curled as if stretching toward the light.
Behind the counter, Sakamoto looked up with a friendly smile. Tinted sunglasses cast a slight color across his face. He was in the midst of crafting a bouquet, trimming a spidery flower with quick, rhythmic cuts.
I had ordered my arrangement online with only the vaguest instructions: dark, cool, something unique. I left the rest entirely to him. The bouquet he handed me felt like something out of a Tim Burton film. A violet anthurium, a shell-pink rose and chrysanthemum and a dusky dahlia sat together like a quartet, fringed with black leaves and navy paper. Needless to say, everyone asked about it at the ceremony, marveling at how cool and unusual it was compared to all the standard bouquets that were being passed around for photos.
That day, Sakamoto was warm, soft-spoken and thoughtful. At the time, I didn’t know he would become even more in-demand, or that his work would take on an increasingly artistic direction. Years passed, and as Tambi Flower grew, I reached out again, this time as a writer, to interview him for Tokyo Weekender.
An Origin Story Born From Stillness
Sakamoto’s journey into floristry didn’t begin with childhood dreams or formal training, but rather in a period of silence and reflection: During the pandemic, he suddenly found himself with hours of unfilled time. One afternoon, on impulse, he decided to get rid of all the furniture in his room except for his desk. When he stepped back to look at what he’d done, the space felt hollow.
“The room looked so lonely,” he told TW over email. “So I tried placing some flowers there. That was the first step.” The flowers softened the emptiness and made the room feel more alive. He kept buying more. He noticed things he hadn’t before — the way the stems curved, the way colors shifted in different lighting and how the textures carried emotion. Slowly but surely, flowers became his language.
“Plants don’t argue or complain. They don’t talk back. I can face them completely honestly,” he explains. “I’m not very good with words, so flowers are always helping me say them.”
Where Beauty Meets Discomfort
Sakamoto’s style isn’t about prettiness in the traditional sense. His arrangements often have tension — pairing soft petals with thorny lines, or setting glossy blooms against stems that seem on the edge of collapse. This duality is intentional; at the core of his practice is a concept he calls “tambi,” borrowing from the Japanese word for decadence and beauty. His interpretation, however, leans into the darker side.
“To me, ‘tambi’ is about showing beauty through what lies behind it, including the grotesque, the gloomy, the decayed,” he says. “It’s not only softness and prettiness.”
This worldview eventually culminated in Floral Dominance, a philosophy that acknowledges the inherent violence in floristry. “We cut flowers — we kill them — and then use them to decorate,” he writes. “That alone places us in a position of dominance over flowers.”
Rather than pretend that this isn’t happening, the artist incorporates that discomfort into his aesthetic. The beauty, he believes, is born not just from the bloom, but from the tension and unease found in the act of arranging.
His work also carries sensuality. Flowers are glossy, wet, alive. And when they wilt, they collapse like something breathing its last. “The beauty of decay and the beauty of life feel close to human desire,” he says. “Plants and people share similar patterns of wanting.”
One of the things that makes Sakamoto’s work so striking is its sculptural quality. His pieces don’t sit passively in vases but jut, curl, unfurl and twist with intention. “Once you decide to use flowers, you’re handling life,” he notes. “So to me, flowers aren’t something I decorate. They’re something I’m allowed to use.” This sense of responsibility — the idea that flowers permit him to shape them — adds weight to his artistic choices. His work isn’t merely about self-expression; it’s also a form of collaboration with the plants he chooses to use.
Sakamoto hopes to share this worldview with others. He recently held his first solo exhibition, “Counter,” in Pupil, a studio space in Hyogo. Although he designed and set up the exhibition himself, he also invited visitors to create their own sculpture using 50 flowers. Through collage and poetry, the exhibition connected physical form with emotional mapping.
Outside live arrangements, Sakamoto also creates photographic works in which flowers become humanoid creatures. He dismantles plants, then reassembles petals, stems and roots into figures placed against a black background. Some pieces are paired with poems he writes himself. A piece called “My Eyes” shows an eyeless creature with a lotus seed head; another, called “Blooming,” shows a creature with auburn leaves as hair wearing a garment made of crumpled petals and dried leaves.
Toward What Comes Next
Today, Sakamoto has more than 335,000 followers on Instagram — a number that still surprises him. But despite his online fame, he remains grounded.
“Social media doesn’t directly influence my expression,” he said. “But I’m grateful. Warm comments and clients who trust me … they’re a bit like medicine to me. They reassure me that it’s okay to trust my direction and keep going.”
Beyond his first solo exhibition at Pupil, Sakamoto has begun stretching his practice internationally, most recently through a collaboration with Berlin-based design and architecture studio Fundamental on the Gravity Vase. It’s a steel-and-glass vessel engineered to give floral sculptures a new sense of freedom. Composed of multiple geometric grids, the vessel allows plants to be placed all throughout, from the top or the sides.
As for what comes next, he hopes to continue both his fresh-flower work and his foray into sculpture and mixed media. One day, he wants to fulfill his dream of showing in Tokyo — “the big city,” he jokes. From those early days in an empty room to now, Noa Sakamoto’s practice has grown into a clear, distinctive voice that continues to evolve as he reshapes how we see and feel floral art.
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Follow Noa Sakamoto on Instagram at @tambiflower.
