Memory of the Sea: The SS Lafayette, 2026
Participatory digital installation across six scenes and thirty-five screens; anamorphic 3D, artificial intelligence, game engine, mobile interface
In collaboration with the Dapeng Peninsula Marine Library at Galeries Lafayette Beijing
Memory of the Sea imagines the ocean as a living archive, written not by the artist alone but by everyone who passes through it. At its centre is the Kunpeng, the colossal creature from the Zhuangzi, a fish of the northern abyss that becomes a bird spanning the sky. Around it swims marine life modelled on two decades of coastal ecological research by the Dapeng Peninsula Marine Library, so myth and scientific record share the same water.
On their phones, visitors raise digital creatures of their own and release them onto the public screens, where they remain. The Kunpeng rises only when strangers shake their phones in unison, a moment of collective will made visible. Over time, these gestures accumulate into a shared ecosystem and a community bound by it. Like any common world, this ocean exists only as long as many people choose to sustain it.
