"Hanami" Honda SH125i 25th Anniversary

Hanami, an artwork dedicated to the iconic Honda scooter

For twenty-five years, the Honda SH125i has been one of the most iconic scooters in Europe, a symbol of design, performance, and quality. To celebrate this important milestone, two special creations will be officially presented, interpreting the model in an artistic and contemporary key. Honda will unveil the SH125i Marmo, a special edition made using recycled acrylic resin with a finish that replicates the natural veins of marble on the scooter's fairings. Filippo Tincolini will present “Hanami”, a life-size SH125i crafted from a monolithic block of Carrara marble.

In the sculpture, only the front part of the scooter emerges and takes shape from the marble block, while the rest remains within the stone, an homage by Tincolini to Michelangelo's "non-finito" (unfinished) technique.

“The choice to interrupt the definition of the work at the exact moment the form begins to appear allows us to 'freeze' the moment when the scooter blossoms like a flower on a branch, an instant in which the marble is no longer just inert matter and the SH125i is not yet fully 'alive'.”

It is like the blooming of flowers in spring, a moment of absolute wonder that anticipates the future fruit. And flowers, a signature of Filippo Tincolini's artistic poetics, are also protagonists in this work. They are the sakura, the small Japanese cherry blossoms, present on the fairing, the fork, and the wheel.

The Spring of Matter

The title of the work, “Hanami”, stems from this encounter between the identity of Japan, Italian material, and the poetics of transformation. The flowers are the sign of a form blossoming.

Just as the hanami tradition in Japan celebrates the fragile and wonderful instant when cherry trees bloom, in Tincolini's work the scooter seems to emerge from the stone at the exact moment of its appearance, and the sculpture becomes the spring of matter.