Techniques

To give everything a cohesive look, I kept the materials as simple as possible and consistent from sculpture to sculpture: white tissue paper, 0.4mm brass wire, white floral tape and glue stick. Aluminum wires of different gauges were used instead for the main structure of stalks and branches.
The scale of each project was defined by the size of the smallest detail I wanted to reproduce and what I could confidently fold as origami and/or realize with the thin brass wire I used. In the end the sculptures ended up ranging from 40 to 170cm in width and/or height with many of the flowers quite close to actual size.
While I tried to be as faithful as possible to the original compositions in the final photographs, I wanted to recreate the plants with more attention to detail and their real nature than it was possible to Korin and his painting style. After identification then, each of the chosen subject underwent a detailed botanical study that helped me in defining the plan of execution of the final sculpture.
Each sculpture posed its own challenges. The Ume tree was the first sculpture I created and as such it almost defined my process of creation. In hindsight, it wasn't the most complex subject to reproduce but the Ume buds really posed the first challenge in origami size.
The Willow tree extended the challenge with its hundred of tiny leaves not wider than 0.5cm.
The Nanakusa composition was also characterized by the myriad of delicate tiny Hagi flowers (as big as my thumb-nail) but it also required a little ingenuity in the realization of the fluffy Pampas grass (Susuki) inflorescence, obviously unfit to be reproduced in paper.
How to render snow masses using paper was another interesting challenge that brought me into a totally new style of origami: tessellation origami where, by creating a regular grid of folded lines and with a few "tours de main", you create a series of interlocking geometrical shapes in a repeating pattern (honestly the longest and most tedious process of the whole endeavor).
A constant across the project, or so it seemed, was counting in "hundreds". Many were the time I had to create 100, 200 or 500 instances of a single item. The mother of all multitudes of pieces was naturally the Hydrangea sculpture, where between flowers and buds, the project almost reached the 2000 pieces. It is easy then to imagine why each sculpture took me anything from 200 to 600 hours to realize.

Part of the Kami of the project is naturally the photographic process that brought the sculptures back into the imagined 2D space. The mood of the images was influenced mainly by the background, almost 6 square meters of hand gilded black washi paper, gleaming at us softly across all the 12 images. The sculpture themselves were lit in a fairly straightforward way and then photographed using hundreds of frames distributed in the 3D space to capture as many details as possible. To remain coherent with the pictorial process, I also decided to have the whole sculpture as much in focus as possible. The post processing of the images was also rather straightforward. Most of the time was divided between combining the many frames shot into a coherent image and then in further shaping the light falling onto the sculptures. Toward the end of the project, I realized that the images were still missing something, they were as if suspended in a perceptual limbo. It then occurred to me that these images will be displayed as if they were Kakejiku (hanging scrolls) and this was when I decided to include part of the classical Kakejiku mounting as part in the image itself.