Radio feature & performative multimedia installation, 2024-2026
On March 23, 2021, a container ship “Ever Given” ran aground in a sandstorm in the Suez Canal, causing a six-day disruption that affected global supply chains. The excavator against the hull becomes instant mythology, rendered into meme.
Borrowing the techniques of live foley, I trace the phantom voyage of the ship that became a monument to its own stillness.
In “Vessels”, six stories crystallize into three variations on liminality:
Dreams adrift: unfolds in cruise ship diaries and mythic vessels, where promises of arrival dissolve into endless departure.
The suspensions: a fugue for an eight years’ exile in liquid desert, a midnight escape of a musician, pirate ships lurching in swirls…
Launching ceremony: transforms steel into flesh, myth into material, death into celebration.
Between Rotterdam’s automated terminals and Shenzhen’s muddy shore, between Japanese shipyards and Egypt’s new monument, I collected sounds that leak from globalization’s edges. My body becomes the medium–in a water rower’s mechanical repetition rowing toward horizons that exist only in the machine’s memory, sculpting absence from clay, playing exile songs on keys that remember other shores.
Project Background:
For a long time, such huge ships have been invisible and hidden in abstract maps and sophisticated algorithmic processes. However, this unexpected “system error” has brought their concrete image into the public eye.
Ever since the Suez Canal linked the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, it has already witnessed multiple tipping points in humanity’s history. 1967-1975, during the time when Egypt and Israel armies were confronting over the Suez Canal as a proxy of the Cold War, two German cargo ships with other 13 from different countries were trapped in the canal for 8 years. With the corona pandemic and the accident of “Ever Given” as a prelude to the Red Sea crisis, the state of global shipping has become a bellwether of today’s geopolitics.
The “Ever Given” was manufactured in Japan, operated between China and Europe by a Taiwanese company. As a Chinese artist living in Europe, this aroused my great interest. In July 2024, I went on my research trips along the route of “Ever Given”.
Seeing the geopolitical and late-capitalistic scenarios above as haunting ghosts, I focus on those various individuals who are (were) living / trapped / exiled on these borders between land and water. By tracing this beast of the ocean, I serendipitously brought together the Suez Canal with several other seemingly unrelated stories either chronologically or geographically.
Taking a perspective that departs from “land-centrism”. This project does not intend to delve further into the “Ever Given” as a metaphor for the current state of globalization, but rather seeks to use this incident as a key to a new narrative, detached from the news and public discussions, to trace and document what happens/has happened, what has not yet been noticed, and what has not yet been told.
A radio feature will be broadcasted on November 10th, 2025 on Bauhaus.FM in Weimar, Germany as a teaser. The complete project will be presented as a performative installation at the Freies Werkstatt Theater Cologne, Germany in 2026.
Still Frames from video footages, Rotterdam, Netherlands & Imabari, Japan, 2024. Camera: Pascal M. Dreier