For the last few years, Takayuki Narita has been working on a project photographing people and their behaviors in a rose garden with humor and wit. While working on it, he came across another universe. Universe that is a polar opposite from the one full of humans intoxicated by the man-made floral fairytale, one that is a field of labor, one that’s governed by the ethics of hard-working bees buzzing through the rose garden. After inviting himself to the queendom, a spin-off bee project, or more accurately documenting the rose garden as a mixed universe paralleling humans to tiny flying bugs (or vice versa), using street-photography methodologies was born. The project is still in-progress, which means that in the last two years the rose garden has been no exception from being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t been able to welcome its fans for the peak seasons. However, business is as usual, if not better, in the bee universe today, thanks to less humans in the queendom. The pandemic is a human's problem, not bee’s. The exhibition will be composed of the images taken before the pandemic. The bees in the pictures are carpenter bees, pronounced Kuman-bachi in Japanese. The title in Japanese is “Rose Garden (Kuman-bachi!), but in considering the title of the exhibition in both Japanese and English, and wanting them to be rhythmically close as well as rhyme in both meanings and phonetics, the photographer chose “Rose Garden (Bumble bee!), which in Japanese is pronounced as Maruhana-bachi.

Cooperation ｜ SHIKKUI UMAKU-NURERU LABO KYOTO

Venue ｜ SHIKKUI UMAKU-NURERU LABO KYOTO

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