Moving image 2025
In this 24-minute experimental video, twenty-four boats drift across the field of vision along the river-sea waterline, following overlapping and parallel trajectories. They appear, glide, and return again—each a solitary voyager, yet together a collective echo.
The outlines of the boats blur, sink, and vanish, leaving behind only floating dust, sand, and unnamed paths of return. This is a polyphony for the seekers—for the journeys of the homebound, the callings of the displaced, and the silhouette of identities substituted in the age of technology.
Return, perhaps, is nothing more than a held breath when the sand reorganizes itself. Polyphony: 24 Boats is the prologue to Drifting into Dunes, surfacing from long silence—
our shared loss of direction.
[I once believed the horizon was the bite-mark of the tide,
a fold line that marked the way home.
Later, I came to understand—
it was merely how boats etched memory into water.
That day, wind wrinkled the surface into crinkled cellophane,
as if trying to drain the entire river.
I stood at the edge of the pier,
watching the first boat glide into view.
It had no name.
Only a silent echo to calibrate its path—
a sentence left unfinished,
sailing from one end to the other.
They say every boat departs from home.
But where is home?
A crossed-out address rewritten on paper?
Or a salt-grain map unfinished on the beach at dusk?
The second boat came, then another.
Each one mirrored the first—
trembling into this dim patch of light,
repeating itself without farewell, without return.
After twelve, they layered like growth rings,
a procession of the forgotten,
sliding toward a forever-unfocused shore.
Everything blurred—like a dream,
or a loop that's been erased too many times.
We speak of disappearance,
but disappearance is already copying itself with carbon paper.
Each morning, new planks replace the old scabs—
like archived bodies erased and duplicated en masse.
Those vanishing piers, the buried riverbeds,
tidelands sprouting shopping malls—
if no one remembers what they were,
does the difference still matter?
If my body, my language, my gestures
are diluted, updated, replaced by time,
then who is “I”?
If the way home is no longer recognizable,
perhaps departure was always the destination.
In a damp era, we've grown so used to drifting
that we’ve come to believe:
as long as we keep moving, we won’t drown.
But you know—
sinking can be a kind of homecoming, too.
I stand at the shore,
patching over this torn seam with handfuls of silence.
There is no arrival—
only folds sewn by twenty-four tides.
The sand waits for a testimony left unsaid.
Until the final boat vanishes from the frame,
leaving behind only dust,
grains of sand,
and names that were never given.
This is the sea’s last letter.
The sand’s quiet poem.
The breath before drifting into dunes.
A dark and drowsy whisper.]