A New Season at When Still HCMC

The period after a large exhibition has its own particular atmosphere. For months, attention narrows toward a single date. Students prepare work, teachers move between classes and installation decisions, materials accumulate, deadlines become more immediate, and the studio begins operating with the intensity of something moving toward a public conclusion. When it is over, the first thing we notice is often the quiet.

After ONE, I continued teaching for three days so the other instructors could step away and rest before the beginning of the new season. What followed was not a dramatic reset so much as a gradual change in the feeling of the studio. When the teachers returned there was genuine excitement to be back, and the students seemed to bring something of the exhibition’s camaraderie with them.

Conversations had become easier. Lunch plans were being made. People who originally knew one another only through class were talking about work, business, family, and the rest of their lives. The exhibition had required them to spend time together under very different conditions from a regular lesson, and some of those relationships had continued beyond it. Flowers had been the reason they met, but increasingly they were becoming the ground on which friendships were forming.

The new season also brought back familiar faces. Students who had been away for several months began returning, often with the sense that they were reconnecting with a part of themselves that had gone quiet while they were away from ikebana. Around them were new beginners arriving at the very first lessons. The two groups did not necessarily interact unless they already knew one another, but there was still a quiet recognition across the room. Returning students understood the uncertainty of starting because they remembered having stood in exactly the same place, while the work of more experienced students offered beginners a glimpse of what continued practice might eventually become.

This is one of the things I value about having different levels in the same studio. Progress does not always need to be explained. A beginner can look across the room and see someone working through a more complex relationship between material and space; an experienced student can watch a first Kakei being built and remember how much concentration was once required to make decisions that now feel instinctive. Each becomes a reference point for the other.

ONE also changed the studio’s relationship with the public. The exhibition brought an increase in inquiries from new students, more conversations about collaborations, and early discussions about future exhibitions. What had been developing inside When Still over several years had become more visible in the wider cultural life of HCMC. That attention created excitement, but it also made the return to ordinary classes feel more important. Public events may make the practice visible, but the work that sustains it still happens at a table with flowers, tools, a teacher, and enough time to look again.

That is the atmosphere I want to preserve in this new season: the renewed energy of teachers returning after rest, older students reconnecting with their practice, beginners entering with curiosity, and relationships becoming more comfortable around the work. Growth matters, but not only through attendance or scale. It also appears in the ease with which students speak to one another, in someone making plans for lunch after class, in a teacher finding a clearer explanation, or in a returning student realizing that their eye has changed while they were away.

Much of this has historically remained inside the studio. We publish finished arrangements and announce exhibitions, but the ideas, conversations, stories, excitement, uncertainty, and understanding that develop between those larger moments are far harder to see from outside. That is one reason the When Still Journal matters to us. The studio produces more than arrangements. It produces friendships, questions, discoveries, ambitions, and small moments of understanding that often disappear as soon as class ends.

A new season gives us another opportunity to pay attention to those things and to record more of the life that surrounds the flowers, not only the works we eventually choose to show publicly.

The exhibition may have ended, but much of what it created has returned to the studio with us.

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