The Sea Rises and Totally Still

The Sea Rises and Totally Still

2019 Dalsbruk (FI)

Curated by Erica Yu-Wen Huang & Nina-Maria Oförsagd for Sea Views
Photography by Cheng Jen-Pei & Chen Yi-Wen

2026 Yilan (TW)

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Fabric, boiled seawater, salt, chalk

The Sea Rises and Totally Still explores maps as cultural constructions, shaped as much by human desire and imagination as by geography. Through fictional geographies, it considers map-making as an imaginative force, capable of creating worlds rather than simply describing them.

It also draws on a Taoist understanding of transformation, where nothing is ever quite fixed and everything moves through change: the cloud was the river and will be the rain tomorrow. Perhaps a map is only a momentary portrait of a landscape in the mind.

The work reflects on geographer Alistair Bonnett’s observation that a sense of loss arises when the world is ‘fully codified and collated’. In the original installation, the map’s precise representation was allowed to dissolve into its surroundings. The framed works revisit this gesture, inviting us to see maps as open-ended ways of imagining and relating to the world.