ARDEN + WHITE GALLERY is honored to present School of the Flower, the debut U.S. solo exhibition by Heath Wae. This poignant and sensorial body of work marks a milestone in the artist’s evolving practice—one that places the flower not simply as a motif of beauty or fragility, but as an enduring emblem of transformation, offering a bridge between the visible and the unseen. Through his latest compositions, Wae draws from ancestral traditions, ceremonial memory, and a profound intimacy with nature to reimagine the flower as a sacred site of devotion, impermanence, and spiritual reciprocity.
Wae’s vision was shaped during his time on remote Indonesian islands, where he observed the role of flora in daily and ceremonial life. In these settings, flowers were not ornamental, but participatory—living offerings embedded in rituals that honored both the human and nonhuman realms. The artist’s immersion in these practices instilled a deep reverence for the ways in which the natural world holds and transmits meaning. It is here that his understanding of the flower expanded beyond the temporal bloom, becoming a vessel of myth, memory, and energetic exchange.
School of the Flower offers a visual cosmology in which each painting serves as both altar and archive. Drawing from goddess iconography, ancient symbology, and his own intuitive mark-making, Wae creates layered fields that collapse time and geography. His works hold space for the cyclical: emergence and decay, sensuality and stillness, the remembered and the imagined. Petals dissolve into portals, blossoms float in and out of abstraction—inviting viewers into states of contemplation that resist linear narrative and instead embrace the spiral rhythms of life.
What emerges is a body of work that is as much about seeing as it is about sensing. In Wae’s hands, the flower becomes a lens for looking inward and outward simultaneously—a metaphor for the permeability between the self and the world, the sacred and the mundane. The act of viewing becomes participatory, calling forth the memory of touch, breath, and reverent observation.
In a cultural moment marked by acceleration and detachment, School of the Flower is a quiet resistance. It is a return to slowness, to care, and to the possibility of reverent exchange. Through Wae’s lush and spiritual compositions, there is an invitation into a devotional practice of attention—one that honors the fragility of life and the enduring wisdom of the natural world.
School of the Flower will be on view form June 5 - July 13, 2025.
