Naho Kawabe “Flos Filicis: Fern Flowers” @ WAITINGROOM
WAITINGROOM is hosting Naho Kawabe’s solo exhibition “Flos Filicis: Fern Flowers,” featuring installations and photo collages exploring themes of energy and labor.Summary
WAITINGROOM is presenting Naho Kawabe’s solo exhibition “Flos Filicis: Fern Flowers” from April 4th to May 3rd, 2026. The exhibition centers around new installation works combining charcoal and electrical materials, along with two series of photo collage works. The title, “Flos Filicis” (Fern Flower), paradoxically refers to ferns, which do not bloom, and symbolizes the unattainable promise of a utopia fueled by endless fossil fuel consumption. Kawabe states that the promise of liberation through infinite energy and a happy utopia through technological progress was like “the flower of a fern.” The new installations spatially represent the complex relationship between ferns, the origin of the modern myth of progress, and the coal mining industry that formed the foundation of modern technological society. The new photo collages are based on research into Japanese immigrants who went to Germany as coal mining laborers starting in 2022. They symbolically interweave ferns and carnations, a motif of resistance and labor movements, organically connecting industrial dynamics and the lives of workers. Presenting the lives of Japanese workers around the 1960s as a narrative, fictional family album, the work attempts to lift up individual lives from the larger framework of coal mining history and weave them back into that framework.
(Source：ART iT)