Luna Ikuta is a Japanese-American artist and designer who strips the color and chlorophyll from living flowers, leaving their translucent cellular structure intact, then submerges the ghostly forms in water to create sculptural underwater gardens.,,Born in Tokyo and based in Los Angeles, she trained as an industrial designer at the Rhode Island School of Design before turning to fine art.,
She began working with plants after encountering the Diphylleia grayi, a flower known for turning transparent in the rain, and researched how to reproduce the effect in her studio.,Each work in her series Afterlife begins by removing a flower's pigment and chlorophyll while preserving its extracellular tissue matrix, a process that takes about three weeks, after which the flower is submerged in water, filmed, and later disintegrates.In October 2020 she minted her first blockchain artwork, California Poppy.,In 2021 she completed Eternal Garlands, a 90-foot canopy of hand-welded stainless steel leaves and vines installed over a public walkway in Culver City, California, describing it as free for anyone to experience.In April 2022 she released Remember Me as a free, uncapped 24-hour mint that drew more than 39,000 wallets. Structured in four chapters — Birth, Life, Afterlife, and Memory — the work inverted a tulip's five-day bloom into a slow-motion sequence and drew on the 1634 Dutch tulip mania to comment on speculative behavior in the NFT market.,Its third phase fell on Easter Sunday following a full moon, aligning the piece's structure with lunar and seasonal cycles rather than the accelerated pace of blockchain block time.
In January 2022 she collaborated with Vogue Singapore on 12 Months of Afterlife, introducing color into the series for the first time across a 13-piece collection released through SuperRare, each piece named for a flower corresponding to a month of the year.In 2023 she presented “Distilled Essence” at the Sturt Haaga Gallery in Los Angeles's Descanso Gardens, a scent and sculpture installation combining decellularized plant tissue with hand-blown perfume vessels centred on linalool, a floral molecule shared across many plant species.,Her 2024 solo exhibition “Rebirth” at Load Gallery in Barcelona extended these themes of impermanence into ego death and renewal, framed by the artist as a search for light within darkness.,In 2025 she designed the spatial concept for MONI Studios, a production studio in Ridgewood, New York founded by Zexi Qi, extending her material-driven practice into interior space through silver metals, glass, crystal, and mirrors chosen to reflect and diffuse light.
