Diving deep with Wu Tsang’s ‘Of Whales’ at the ICA
“Of Whales,” a dreamy underwater/ out of body video installation by the artist Wu Tsang now at the Institute of Contemporary Art, says next to nothing but means so very much. In a darkened gallery strewn with beanbag chairs, a huge screen unfurls a deepwater epic of vast, cosmic scope with such captivating grace that it’s impossible not to be drawn in.
An hour slipped past me in its briny depths like a moment; I could have stayed twice as long and hardly noticed. (The piece, which recombines scenes algorithmically, can run for four hours without repeating itself.)
Tsang, a Worcester native, debuted it in 2022 at the Venice Biennale; it’s the second of a pair of video works based on “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville’s great American seafaring epic. In “Moby Dick; or The Whale,” her part one, Tsang reimagines the Pequod, Captain Ahab’s ship, as an alternate reality apart from the conventions of 19th-century colonial America, where race and gender are fluid, and Ishmael and Queequeg are lovers.
There’s no hint of those elements here. But the imaginative space the whale creates is bottomless, if you’ll pardon the pun. Jellyfish and phytoplankton of the human-known oceanic universe drift by, as imagined to be seen by a diving sperm whale’s dinner plate-sized eye. Depths become more alien by the moment, dissolving into a galaxy of the unfathomable.
“Of Whales” achieves the rare magic of being both meditative and wildly stimulating. Its loose and entrancing visual field unspools against a soundtrack of sparse free jazz, lending it an atmospheric, abstract air.
It’s an apt score, as the piece arcs from known to unknowable. The mind drifts on a journey through a towering kelp forest, a passenger through the shallows, lightning flashing from above the waves. You’re en route, briefly, to the surface, bubbling up to see the unmistakeable pink-hued clouds of a New England dawn drifting overhead, while the jagged forks of an electrical storm streak the sky in the near distance.
A breath, and down again; a sperm whale can stay below the surface for two hours, give or take, and dive thousands of feet. That remarkable fact gives Tsang near infinite license to create her own world beneath the waves, and her imagination begins where the known ocean ends: Bioluminous jellyfish cascade upward on a drift deeper into blackness; then, a swirl of bright flecks disperses as a fiery eclipse-like flash pinwheels from below, a black hole swallowing errant rays of light in its maw.
The deep sea, in her telling, is cosmic, infinite, beautiful, a portal to realities unknown. And make no mistake: “Of Whales” is extravagantly beautiful; you pass through the blazing ring of light into a nebula of lavender fog shrouding a softly indistinct landscape — another world beyond the depths.
Somewhere along the way, fluid silhouettes of whales glide lazily through star-heavy skies. Whale heaven? Beats me. It’s the only moment that felt even slightly off, but by then, I was so thoroughly blissed out by the warm bath of sound and vision, it hardly mattered.
“Of Whales” is, to put it mildly, far out; those seeking a David Attenborough-esque plunge into a recognizable deep will be shocked, but there’s no way to be disappointed. The piece asks far larger questions than what mysteries the deep sea holds; it’s a meditation on the limits of human understanding, and the power of the imagination to contemplate what might lie beyond.