幸せの青い鳥プロジェクト // "The Blue Bird of Happiness" Project

Within Hanasaku Kurashi Lab, which explores the creation of tomorrow’s landscapes, this work seeks to carry the value of living with flowers into the future through children’s creativity and hands-on civic engagement.
In December 2025, artist Shinta Inoue visited local nursery schools in Inaba, Noda, and Iragomisaki, working together with children to create the project. About 70 “blue birds,” as if flying in from a deep blue sky, gently descend into a garden of bright yellow canola flowers.
Following workshops held in March, a series of colorful birdhouses will also appear, adorned with driftwood, shells, sea glass, and other objects washed ashore from the Pacific Ocean.
By shifting flowers from something merely to be admired into something to engage with, nurture, and remember, this landscape makes visible the process through which a “Flower city, Tahara” emerges from everyday life. Amid the field of flowers in full bloom, visitors are invited to search for their own Blue Bird of Happiness.

■Shinta Inoue
Inoue has held numerous exhibitions and workshops in Japan and abroad, centering on the “Shepherd Project”. In recent years, he has focused on directing multidisciplinary spatial projects, actively exploring two-dimensional constructions in new contexts such as theaters, Noh stages, tea rooms, and hospitals, while investigating the possibilities of next-generation planar expression. His recent work includes serving as art director for the Sanriku International Arts Festival and the Sanriku Blue Line Project, promoting new forms of community art along the Sanriku coast. In Osaka, he is currently developing the Waterside Safari Park Project.