We Are the Sea Exhibition Celebrates UN World Oceans Day

Description

“We are the sea, we are the ocean,” once declared the celebrated Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa. Inspired by these words, Filipino artist Josephine Turalba has assembled her biting new Hong Kong exhibition We Are the Sea, a collection of works tackling the ecological plight of our waterways, staged symbolically amid the waves of UN World Oceans Day, which falls on 8 June.

Curated by art historian Caroline Ha Thuc, the show pointedly invites viewers to shift their gaze from the human lives played out on land, to consider an “oceanic worldview” on a planet where more than 70 per cent of its surface is water — especially pertinent in the nautical hub of Hong Kong.

Assembled from an indigenous Filipino fabric woven fabric, pina silk, and measuring up to six metres in height, the 10 embroidered vertical panels in the Drifting Threads and Topographies transport viewers to an idyllic reef-lined underwater world where threatening boats hover overhead like UFOs. In the highly topical Strait Lines, viewers encounter the Detroit of Hormuz from a fish’s perspective. Newly created for the exhibition at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is Re:clamation, a video animation drawing from the aquatic mythologies of Hong Kong, as well as Japan and the Philippines.