Between Waves
Brooklyn Rail
2023-2024
Between Waves positions the ocean as a living archive of migration, memory, and resilience, tracing the ways contemporary artists engage with its shifting histories. Across the Asia-Pacific, waves have carried ancient seafarers, colonial violence, and ecological crises, yet they also sustain relational networks that defy imposed borders. Through moving image, installation, and performance, the artists in the exhibition reclaim the sea as a site of resistance, remembrance, and future-making. From ancient seafaring networks to the forced relocations of colonial rule and the ecological crises of rising sea levels, the Pacific has been continuously reshaped by waves of human and environmental change. Between Waves engages contemporary artistic practices that critically navigate these legacies, transforming the ocean into a site of inquiry, resistance, and creative possibility.
The curatorial proposition challenges the continental bias that privileges land-based territoriality over maritime relationality. Drawing on Epeli Hauʻofa’s Our Sea of Islands (1993), the exhibition rejects cartographies that depict islands as isolated peripheries. Instead, it embraces a vision of the Pacific as an interconnected field of movement, kinship, and cultural transmission—where the ocean is not a void, but a bridge. From ancient navigation to contemporary struggles against rising seas and extractive geopolitics, the ocean is recast as a generative site of historical continuity and speculative transformation.
This relational perspective extends beyond metaphor to material reality. Pacific islanders have long engaged in long-distance voyaging, inter-island trade, and shared cosmologies, forming fluid networks that transcend the artificial borders imposed by colonial histories. The ocean does not merely surround islands—it carries people, knowledge, and histories across vast distances, ensuring cultural resilience despite fragmentation.
Syaman Rapongan, a writer and fisherman from Orchid Island (Lanyu), Taiwan, expands this framework by grounding it in indigenous Tao (Yami) epistemologies. For Rapongan, the ocean is not an obstacle to be crossed but a living entity—an ancestral archive and a space of coexistence between humans and non-humans.3 Lanyu’s history, shaped by Japanese colonization, Cold War geopolitics, and the ongoing nuclear waste crisis, informs his alternative vision of island life beyond extractive and colonial paradigms. Against modernist views that render the ocean as vast and inhospitable, Rapongan asserts it as a kinship space, where survival depends on a reciprocal relationship with its rhythms and movements. To inhabit an island, he suggests, is to be attuned to the ocean’s shifting conditions, its moods, and its generational memory.
While Hauʻofa conceptualizes the Pacific as a network of historical and cultural entanglements, Rapongan embodies this relationality through practice. Fishing, boat-building, and oral storytelling are not only survival strategies but acts of cultural continuity that reaffirm Tao identity and spiritual ties to the sea. Here, the ocean is not a passive witness to history but an active force shaping indigenous knowledge and resilience.
Together, Hauʻofa and Rapongan provide a critical foundation for rethinking islands beyond fixed territorial constraints, foregrounding archipelagic thinking as a mode of survival. Between Waves builds on these ideas, repositioning the ocean as a vital force that sustains life, memory, and artistic production. Islands are not isolated fragments—they are dynamic nodes within a larger network of movement, migration, and interwoven histories. The ocean is not merely a surrounding presence; it is embedded in island identity, carrying stories of displacement and endurance, ensuring cultural memory persists despite colonial erasures and geopolitical ruptures.
To fully engage with these complexities, Between Waves is structured around several interrelated inquiries. First, it examines the historical and geopolitical forces that have shaped island identities in the Asia-Pacific, from colonial encounters to military frontiers, revealing how islands have been framed as both strategic outposts and sites of indigenous resistance. Second, it explores the archipelagic as a conceptual and methodological alternative to continental thought, foregrounding islands as spaces of mediation rather than isolation. Drawing on oceanic epistemologies, it investigates how indigenous knowledge systems and ecological entanglements challenge imposed territoriality and militarized geographies. Finally, it considers how contemporary artists and curatorial practices reimagine the archipelago, employing proximity and relational aesthetics to foster new solidarities and alternative futures. By positioning the ocean as an active agent rather than a passive backdrop, Between Waves expands the discourse on islands, migration, and resilience, offering a curatorial proposition that dissolves boundaries and reclaims the ocean as a site of continuity, memory, and transformation.
Featuring work by: Martha Atienza, En Man Chang, Yin Ju Chen, Jesse Chun, Miyagi Futoshi, Maya Jeffereis, Jane Jin Kaisen, Yuki Kihara, Jia-Jen Lin, Yu Liu, Vandy Rattana, Lisa Reihana, Tita Salina & Irwan Ahmett, Lieko Shiga, Kahurangiariki Smith, Su Yu Hsin, Pagrok Sulap, Hong Kai Wang, and Lauren Bon & Metabolic Studio
