Dive Across Asia: Artistic Investigations, Sea People and Ecology
Weakened by industrialisation, pollution and climate change, the marine ecosystem of Asia is now attracting the attention of researchers and artists working to spotlight and revive local customs that may hold the key to a new relationship between humanity and nature.
Traditional fishermen, divers, seafood foragers and seafaring people have been living in symbiosis with the sea and the marine environment for centuries, transmitting their empirical knowledge of the local ecology from generation to generation. Today, these communities across the world are on the verge of disappearing, deeply impacted by climate change, intensive economic growth, rapid urban development and by a modernity that does not include them in its process of expansion. However, many researchers, artists and ecologists are now increasingly turning their attention to such knowhow, inclusiveness and interconnectedness with nature to think anew about today's ecological challenges and models of development.
In Asia, some artists have chosen to immerse themselves among such communities in order to learn and be inspired by their way of life, and, eventually, as a means to give them a voice through various artistic modes of expression. Following and often sharing the daily routine of Indian fishermen, Japanese ama divers and Indonesian Sea People, they document their skills, specific gestures, habitats, beliefs and cultural habits but also the complex and interwoven challenges they are facing. Their engagement highlights another way to approach artistic creation through pluri-disciplinary modes of research, knowledge production and fieldwork investigations.
IMPLICITLY
Ravi Agarwal is an Indian artist, documentary photographer and environmental activist. His pluri-disciplinary practices aim at addressing today’s ecological crisis and environmental injustice. Else All Will Be Still (2013-15) is a series of works, mainly photographs and videos, derived from the artist’s long-term fieldwork among fishermen in a small coastal village ofTamil Nadu, in the south-eastern part of India. With a coastline of 1,076 km and about 600 fishing villages, the region is one of the most important Indian states for fish production, and a place of high biodiversity. Today, new techniques of fishing are putting pressure on the local environment and on the natural stock in a national context of overfishing. Besides, mechanized boats compete inequitably with smaller and traditional wooden boats. Despite recent regulations, the small-scale fishermen have little agency regarding the decisions that are made about the development of their own land and economic activities.
As a result, the traditional fishing communities keep shrinking, squeezed between too many issues that increase their vulnerability. Some fishermen make sure that their children do not learn how to swim, so that they will never derive their livelihood from the sea. For the older generation, swimming was equivalent to walking, and they all learnt it at a very young age. Now, an immense gap is thus dividing the generations, and the knowledge of the elders is about to vanish.
De gauche à droite from left: Tita Salina et and Irwan Ahmett. Harvest from Atlantis. 2019. Vidéo à canal unique single channel video. 11 min 37. (Court. les artistes et Blindspot Gallery).
Ravi Agarwal. Sangam Engines. 2015. Tirages jet d’encre inkjet prints. 15,5 x 23 cm chaque each. (Court. l’artiste et The Guild Art Gallery)
As an invitation to penetrate their daily lives, to see their work techniques and to approach some of their concerns, Else All Will Be Still gives these fishermen a voice. Agarwal does so only implicitly because he is wary of stereotypes and of the relations of power implied by the representation of others. Therefore, most of the works feature landscapes, tools and engines, or focus solely on the human gestures.
Following a holistic and pluridisciplinary approach, the series unfolds into a profusion of various artworks that complement and dialogue with one another. From technical details about ports planning to fishing skills, ancient poetry and recordings of the breath of the ocean, the artist suggests the need to embrace a plurality of mediums and languages in order to enlarge our understanding of reality. At the same time, the artist questions his own ability to grasp its complexities. In his diary, which is part of the work, he asks: “What are the boundaries of ‘ecology,’ of ‘nature,’ of ‘knowing?”
SEA-WOMEN
In the series, the role of technique as an intermediary between human beings and their environment is particularly striking. Ultimately, labour appears as the quintessential way to interact with nature and, more specifically, with the sea. A trilogy of videos (2015) is dedicated to peculiar fishing techniques: the art of dropping a net in Shoreline I; the art of building a traditional boat ( kattumaran) in Shoreline II and the art of mending a fishing net in Shoreline III. Favouring long and steady shots, the camera focuses on the fisherman’s skilful hands, with close shots on the nets, rope, and wooden trunks that constitute his traditional boat.This focus exacerbates his loneliness while at sea, and the very slow pace of the work or the repetition of his movements locate his gestures outside of time.
While Agarwal drew on an early form ofTamil poetry to illuminate his research outcome, Japan-based duo MAP Office connects the lifestyle of today’s ama divers, in the bay of Ise, with Japanese mythology and classical iconography.This artistic strategy allows the artists to emphasize the continuity of the traditions they are investigating. Inspired by ukiyo-e, the golden age of Japanese prints aesthetics, The Ise Bay Project (2018) crystallizes the complex issues that coalesce in the example of these women communities.
Ama divers, or Japanese sea-women, have been foraging for shells and seafood for about three thousand years. Beyond their exotic and sensual representations as mermaids collecting pearls, as often seen through the art of ukiyo-e, and beyond their free-diving technical feats (they dive without technical assistance twice a day for about one hour) their way of life embodies an inspiring representation of a sustainable socioecological system. For centuries, they have had their own way to engage with the natural resources of the sea, setting their own rules of diving, and selecting the size and type of seafood they harvest according to the season. They also accept a certain precarity, since a successful fishing day is never guaranteed, and they help one another among the community. Implicitly, they remind us that the sea, as an open space, is not bound by individual property and thus escapes traditional economic discourses.
The Ise Bay Project (2018) depicts an ama diver following her daily routine, represented according to eight stages that embrace mythological as well as present-day times: fighting the dragon, diving, collecting abalones, drying seaweeds, cooking, reading poetry and, finally, dreaming of a dragon-cat creature. The panels are framed by a screen and can be read as one story from left to right. The computer-based drawings feature the
same character, enacted by a living performer who studied and replicated the postures of the ama divers as depicted by the Japanese painters of the Edo period. Whilst the general aesthetics is inspired by the natural pigments and patterns of ukiyo-e, the artists gave them a contemporary twist: when looking at details, one can for instance spot a pair of plastic flip flop in front of the community hut ( amagoya), or a Thermos flask nearby the plate where she prepares her seafood. Conversely, many famous woodblock drawings from the 19th century are revived and reinterpreted within the narrative. The inclusiveness and interconnectedness that link the ama and her environment are embodied by a continuum of time and space created by the work. The background is an open landscape in which the sea, the garden and the ama’s hut are part of a same wholeness.The ama is represented both under the water and on the land, at home and outside, in reality and in dream, as a woman and as a goddess, constantly crossing bridges between opposite fields. There is thus a strong continuity between all the featured elements, be they humans, mythological or non-humans. As she walks back home, the ama is caught in a cold wind and the sea-urchin motifs of her kimono seem to fly away from her clothes, as if blown out by the wind. This image widens our conception of reality: even the outlines that define objects are liable to be transgressed.
MUTUAL SUPPORT
In contrast, the video Riau (2005) by Zai Kuning seems at first much more straightforward in its documentary-like format, albeit edited in a poetic way. The Singaporean artist narrates his long journey in search of the Orang Laut (Malay word for “sea people”). He finally catches up with them after months of waiting and traveling around the Riau ar
Zai Kuning. Riau. 2003. Vidéo numérique16:9, couleur, son digital video, color, sound. 29 min 45. (© Zai Kuning ; Court. Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai/ Singapore /Tokyo)
chipelago. They eventually adopt him, and he could follow them in their nomadic life for three years, filming them and their lifestyle with a hand-held camera.
The Orang Laut, one of several nomadic fishing and foraging communities of maritime Southeast Asia, live in-between the numerous islands of the Riau archipelago, East of Sumatra. The area belongs to Indonesia but used to encompass Singapore and Johor. In the past, these communities contributed to shape the seascape of the region, playing a great part in its transnational interactions, its sea-oriented economies and ancient thalassocracies. Only a few of these sea people still follow an entirely nomadic way of life. Today, the majority lives in coastal settlements and not on boats. However, this change has not brought to them stability. Instead, they have become communities at risk, economically as well as culturally.
Most of the Orang Laut are animists. Their belief system is based on a mutual solidarity between all existing things, including the sea, the rivers and the mountains. Some parts of their rituals and cultural performances (in particular the ancient form of Malay opera, mak yong) tend to be either neglected or rejected by official cultural canons. The video, for instance, features a long scene showing an official speech delivered in a local cultural hall during which the speaker calls for a Malay unifying identity, asking the crowd to repeat his vows after him. Implicitly, the artist underlines how such political and nationalist statements undermine the singularity of the Orang Laut culture.
In his approach of the community, Zai Kuning is not confronted with Agarwal’s concern about the representation of others: some of his own relatives are actually descendants of the sea people, and he remembers that they were calling him in his dreams. He never refers to them as “they” but feels part of them. Because the film is shot with a portable camera, we also feel part of their routine, rocking on their small vessels or witnessing their daily activities. At one stage, we embark on a boat with two men who are singing, drinking, smoking and playing the guitar. The camera is lying at the bottom of the boat, giving the impression that we are part of the feast. In fact, we never hear their voices, except when they sing, as the soundtrack consists mainly of old Malay folk songs and music compositions by the artist, together with Japanese musician Tetsu Saitoh. Inevitably, a sense of nostalgia arises from the film, a perspective shared by many of these artists when it comes to imagining the future of these vulnerable communities.
In his ongoing project Make Sea (since 2016), Chinese artist He Junyan has been likewise documenting the decline of the local fishing communities in the Zhuhai area, a group of more than 200 islands located in the South China Sea. Overfishing, land reclamation, the expansion of aquaculture, dam construction and pollution have also resulted in a rapid depletion of fish stocks in these waters, putting a constant strain on the fishing communities. In Indonesia, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett have been following a coastal community in Jakarta Bay, documenting their livelihood based on mussel cultivation. Their video, Harvest from Atlantis (2019), features their rituals, daily routine and the erection of a bamboo structure in the middle of the sea as a symbol for their resilience. As for Yee I-Lann, working in her homeland of Kota Kinabalu on Borneo Island, she has been collaborating with the Bajau Laut sea people since 2018, weaving and dying together with local women mats and Tikar Reben— a long piece of fabric whose pattern embodies the seafaring people’s knowledge.
As they highlight the very similar challenges and issues faced by the coastal communities across Asia, the above artists also point to the commonality of their ancestral ecological knowledge and culture. Although rooted in the specific landscape they live in, they connect beyond their local identities and give shape to an imaginary geography that invites us to approach territories and ecological questions with a more fluid and inclusive perspective.
Dr. Caroline Ha Thuc is an independent art writer, curator and researcher based in Hong Kong. This article was inspired by her research for the exhibition Boundless Sea: becoming an artist-researcher. Featuring Ravi Agarwal, MAP Office, He Junyan and, originally, Zai Kuning, it runs from December 2021 to March 2022 at the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.