There’s something disarmingly honest about CJ Hendry. Sit with her long enough and she’ll tell you, without a trace of false modesty, that she’s “not that creative.” Coming from one of the most talked-about artists working today — the woman behind the Flower Market installations that have stopped cities in their tracks, Singapore most recently — it’s the kind of line that makes you lean in a little closer.
“I’m just a really good replicator of a photo,” she tells the journalists at COMO Orchard today (19 June), laughing. “I am like a human printer.”
And yet, what CJ has built from that self-described limitation is nothing short of extraordinary. The Flower Market is a sprawling, immersive installation of oversized, plush-like blooms you can actually take home and it has drawn in school kids and the elderly alike, all of them walking out with smiles on their faces and flowers in their hands. “Everyone is having an extraordinary time,” she says. “That’s really special. I’d certainly know that in the art world it can be very heavy duty, and that’s not for everyone. But this is just very friendly, very approachable, and it’s for the old, the young, and literally everyone in between.”
The flowers themselves, she explains, were never meant to be a critique of the real thing. CJ is quick to clarify that. “I’m someone who buys real flowers, don’t get me wrong.” But life — three kids, a busy studio, the beautiful chaos of just keeping up — led her somewhere more practical, and more joyful. “For me, at my point in life, having fake flowers at home is just right up my alley. They’re fun, they’re whimsical.” The Flower Market, it turns out, wasn’t born from a grand artistic vision. It was born from frustration. From wanting to go bigger than a page would allow. From years of iteration, wrong turns, and eventually — almost accidentally — landing on exactly the right thing. “The flower market stumbled across by accident,” she says simply. “It’s been 15 years of me doing this.”
What strikes me about CJ is how deeply she believes that creativity doesn’t come from total freedom — it comes from being hemmed in. “I’m a very structured person; I believe that creativity comes from constraints.” Those constraints have been financial, practical, personal. Building the Flower Market costs an enormous amount — both for her studio and for partner IMBA — to bring it to people entirely for free. That’s not a small thing, and she doesn’t treat it like one.
The entry is free. The first flower is free. And what happens after that? Well, CJ has made peace with not controlling it. Some visitors come in quietly, take their one flower, pay for an extra. Families who couldn’t otherwise afford flowers walk away with armfuls. Others come in and scalp hundreds. “So be it,” she says, with a shrug that somehow feels considered rather than resigned. “I like the idea of there being almost no rules. You come in, and yeah, maybe there’s a commentary on consumerism. Maybe that’s the point.”
She doesn’t put her name on the wall. There’s no lengthy blurb telling you what to think. “You can come in, you can experience my exhibitions however you choose to,” she says. “That is completely uninteresting to me when they tell you what to think.”
Then there’s juju. The little toy that was never supposed to become anything, and now absolutely has. CJ designed it using AI, with up to thirty or forty iterations run through ChatGPT, prompts layered on prompts, until something finally emerged that felt right. “The first thing that popped out was horrible. I was like, ‘It’s disgusting’.” But eventually, there she was: a soft, round little creature, vaguely in conversation with the Labubu craze at the time, but deliberately warmer, more approachable. “I just wanted it to be a slight twist, but kind of like a commentary on the Labubu, and we just wanted to make it a little more friendly.”
The name? That one’s personal. CJ’s kids call her mother Judy “Juju” — they’ve never quite managed the full name. Her mum, she tells me, is “a very elegant woman. She wears pearls. She always wears white.” The rarest juju edition is always white, always pearls. “And yes, she had two daughters, Pam and I, who are just the most non-elegant people in the world.” She grins saying it.
Nobody set out to create a toy that would outlast a single exhibition. But now there are conversations — serious ones — about taking juju much further. IP licensing. Scaling. All the things that happen when something catches. CJ is careful here. “There have been conversations about taking this, you know, right up to the stars,” she tells me when I asked about IP offers. “I’m like, maybe eventually. But right now we’re just having a lot of fun, and until that feels right, until we can work that out, we’re just going to keep working and running and doing crazy shit.”
The reason she can afford to be patient is something she’s genuinely grateful for. “I am a commercial artist and the studio does support itself,” she says. “I’m not in a position where I have to sub this IP out to everyone. We do have a lot of control because we’re in a position to have control. I know how lucky you are to be in that position, and I don’t treat that lightly.”
There’s a line she comes back to, in different ways, throughout our conversation. That she always puts the idea first. That you can always tell when someone is going purely after commercial gain — “it feels wrong, it feels grabby” — and that her job as an artist is to make you feel something. Excited. Angry. Stopped in your tracks. “I’m not out here to please everyone,” she says. “I’m not out here to make everyone my friend, but if I wanted to do that, I’d go and sell ice cream or pizza.”
Towards the end of the year, she’s thinking about expanding the juju universe — more characters, more stories, a whole world still being figured out. “What’s that going to look like? I have no idea,” she admits. And somehow, coming from CJ Hendry, that feels less like uncertainty and more like exactly where the best things begin.
juju World opens to the public 20th June onwards at IMBA. Get your tickets.
