Intertidal Thinking:
Ten (or More) Islands
+ A Chart of Places
that had Disappeared

A masterclass workshop, and two art installations for the Prep-room Currents at the
NUS Museum. Workshops: 23 July-16 August 2024; Prep-Room Exhibition: 16 August-26 November 2024.

The Masterclass entitled Intertidal Thinking was led by Wong Zihao (2 August 2024);
A collaborative artwork Ten (or More) Islands was made as part of the workshop, with the participating artists: Abdul Latiff Hamzah, Ang Ruijie Thaddeus, Chan Yiqian, Liu Diancong, JX Soo, Kendra Thaddeaus Tang, Lu Yixin, Sarah Noorhimli, Young Weiping, and Zhai Qiutong. The Prep-room exhibition also showcased the artistic research A Chart of Places that had Disappeared by Liu Diancong.

Curated by Siddharta Perez and Ye Thu, with university collaborators A/P Hamzah Muzaini, and artists Charles Lim, Ila, and Marvin Tang.

Intertidal Thinking

The intertidal is the shapeshifting part of coastal geographies that becomes ground in the low-tide and reverts into sea when the tide rises back up-shore. Land-centric cartographical maps lack generosity and care in representing this liminal zone. Mapping conventions of drawing and seeing find it a challenge to delineate clear boundaries between set topographical categories for these otherwise ambiguous and shifting places. Neither land, nor water, it is both land-and-water. The intertidal speaks not of singular, discreet, bounded spaces, but of multi-places within which a multiplicity of things move and collide, figure and re-figure, stabilise and destabilise continually across space and time. Indeed, the intertidal is a zone that never stays still. The landscape margins perpetually oscillate between partial and unstable states of exposure and concealment; surfacing and submergence; buoyancy and sinking; sedimentation and erosion; gatherings and leavings; taking form and coming apart.

This workshop will explore the intertidal as a metaphorical armature for thinking about the “inter” relations that collectively bind and unbind our artmaking processes and practices. Intertidal thinking references the notion of “watery thinking” put forth in architect-researcher Cecelia Chen’s proposal for alternative cartographies of water.[1] To think with water is to be attentive to the way water “is always picking up, carrying along, dropping off, and bonding with other elements”.[2] To think intertidally, is to destabilise the subject(s), processes and products of our artmaking as fixed and bounded in place—in the here and now. Instead, it is to be (in)formed by multiple histories and places, since water “materially communicates where it has been” and “what has occurred elsewhere”.[3] Intertidal thinking is also future-oriented, speculative of future assemblages yet to be formed—including "even what is possible”.[4]

Intertidal thinking is a more specific form of watery thinking. Not only does it engage thought on the slippery movements of ideas and things across places, to think as the intertidal—neither water, nor land, but water-and-land—requires that we grapple with both the fluidity and yet grounded-ness of ideas and things as they form and unform in place. The intertidal zone connects matter and material across distant shores in a singular place. Things (and ideas) are swept out of places in the ebbing tides, and with the flowing tide reconstitute in other groupings, in other places. Ground in the intertidal zone is an assemblage of human(made) things and more-than-human bodies, some conjoined in more temporary ways, and others more permanently. The artist Linda Cracknell and cultural geographer Owain Jones evocatively recall the intertidal ground in the low tide revealing their absurd yet imaginative compositions of “frayed plastic rope, upended chairs sunk in mud [and] single boots.”[5] The intertidal is also home ground to other bodily hybridities “of seals grounded or swimming, of stalking birds that can wade or fly or float [and of] shellfish that are half-fish, half-flesh; half-stone, half-living-thing”.[6]

Considering as well how “thinking” is formed like “assemblages”—as if extensions of our very own bodies—intertidal thinking traces the happening of ideas as they surface and take form sometimes with less defined boundaries (of selves, practices, and disciplines), and within more amorphous and promiscuous trajectories, intertwined with the thoughts of others. Thinking about the intertidal as multi-grounds and multi-places that assemble and reassemble in space and time, opens our artmaking processes to collaborative interplay between (and beyond) artmaking bodies and selves, and with more-than-human artmaking collaborators: landscapes, matter and materials, weather, lines, maps, ecologies, stories, ghosts, histories, and futures. How might intertidal thinking destabilise our artmaking processes? Conversely, how might intertidal thinking enable new connective grounds of artmaking and research to sediment—however fleetingly? How can our artmaking collaborate in intertidal ways?

[1] Cecelia Chen, “Mapping Waters: Thinking with Watery Places,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecelia Chen, Janine Macleod, and Astrida Neimanis (Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 274–98.

[2-4] Chen, 277.

[5-6] Linda Cracknell and Owain Jones, “A Conversational Essay on Tides by Linda Cracknell and Owain Jones,” Research, Tidal Cultures, June 7, 2014, https://tidalcultures.wordpress.com/a-conversational-essay-on-tides-by-linda-cracknell-and-owain-jones/

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Ten (or More) Islands

Artmaking proposal and facilitation by Wong Zihao;
The collaborative artwork Ten (or More) Islands was made as part of the workshop, with the participating artists: Abdul Latiff Hamzah, Ang Ruijie Thaddeus, Chan Yiqian, Liu Diancong, JX Soo, Kendra Thaddeaus Tang, Lu Yixin, Sarah Noorhimli, Young Weiping, and Zhai Qiutong.

Part 1: Buoyancy + Sedimentation registers the movement of matter and materials, thoughts and ideas, artmaking processes and artworks, selves and landscapes, going from high to low tide. As the sea ebbs away outshore, once buoyant and free-floating materials gain gravitas and fall towards the exposed ground, finding place, finding form, finding organisation—even if only momentarily.

During their time of Buoyancy + Sedimentation, the participants were led through a time of sedimentation—consolidating their ideas and thoughts of their artwork proposals into scribbled texts and graphic scrawls on paper.  We will shared our idea sedimentations, thinking aloud with sketch texts and visuals. The cross-contribution of new prompt words interacting with their ongoing idea proposals. From sedimentation the proposals re-gained buoyant flight, and drew new lines of trajectory finding fresh ground (and yet discovered coasts) with each others’ artmaking processes.

Part 2: Shapeshifting (Island-Making) Assemblages is a collaborative island-forming, and intertidal map-making exercise, tracing the lines of flight between ideas of artmaking processes and artwork proposals. The process and outcome is a large drawing of lines and texts, locating centres of sedimentations and possible/emergent buoyant movements, crossing boundaries of self, artmaking practices and disciplinary lines, to produce an archipelagic “map” formed of wider “inter” relations and collaborations that bind (and unbind) artists, artmaking processes, and artworks.

This experimental map traced how the participants’ projects collided, colluded and dialogued between bodies of work, and as well with the watery landscape subjects of each participants’ artmaking predilections. Drawing and writing, the workshop produced a shapeshifting cloud of idea propositions. In finding ways to map our collaborative artmaking interfaces and interferences, the participants engaged with thinking and performing the intertidal, in a continually shapeshifting and evolving archipelago of artmaking ideas and practices.  

A Chart of Places that had Disappeared

An art installation for the Prep-room “Currents” at the NUS Museum, by Liu Diancong;
Curated by Siddharta Perez and Ye Thu.
Knowledge and artmaking guidance from Hamza Muzaini, Charles Lim, Ila and Marvin Tang, and Wong Zihao.

When I was a child, Chinese New Year was celebrated at my uncle’s house, in my parent’s hometown, located on the shores of the Maple Reservoir, in Heyuan, Guangdong. Uncle’s house, perched on a floating mat, had to be pushed into the water during low tide and pulled back onto the shore when the tide came back up. This shapeshifting zone of the intertidal, neither entirely land nor water, but both, isn’t recognized as grounds of inhabitation in the conventions of architecture: not yet stable enough, not yet dry enough to build on, and live within. Yet, I remember how the people who lived along the tidally shifting coastline where my uncle’s house was, were the most well-adapted to living with water. They knew how to read the subtle changes in their watery environments—something that scientists and architects are only learning to understand in this present time.

Recently I noticed an unfamiliar and ephemeral “man-made” island appearing like a ghost on the satellite maps showing the area of my parents’ floating hometown. Speaking with my grandparents, I learned how my uncle’s house floated above what would be a submerged ghost town. The town had long been flooded during the construction of the reservoir in 1972. The floodwaters buried the ruined town, swallowing along with it all the histories and memories of the displaced townsfolk. In time to come, the town diminished into nothing, and few people can hardly remember the stories told of this lost place. The submerged town would have remained an underwater secret for all posterity until a strange thing occurred. In 2023, transformations in the water levels caused by rising temperatures and climate change resulted in a drastic ebb of the waterlines, exposing the higher topographies tracing the outline of the vanished town.

Here lies eighteen elusive places, slipping in and out of existence. No one can accurately pinpoint their location, for they remain unseen, shapeshifting even to hide beneath the water during high tide. Sometimes fragments of these places appear, emerging to view, when the tide is low. They defy the practice of mapping, akin to glitches in the fabric of cartography, haunting the landscape as ghostly apparitions. Their presence cannot be measured, but only hinted at through stories. When parts of these places occasionally surface, then only can we catch glimpses of what wholes these fragments tell of: what these places once were.

Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark, in which he speculatively describes a large blank map that could only be used to represent the ocean’s vastness—without a view of the edge’s of land—“A Chart of Places that had Disappeared” explores an unusual hydrographic “mapping” of vanished underwater places. Here are my ghost stories telling of submerged cities and villages, and other places of inhabitation that possibly endured for centuries before they vanished from the surface of the map, whether by accident or design. Scattered throughout the exhibition space of the Prep-room “Currents” at the NUS Museum, my collection of stories do not—and cannot—reveal the precise locations of the villages. Yet in collecting these stories of displacements, I imagined how the inhabitants were forced to leave, eventually forgetting their hometowns after the passing of several generations. It might be as if these places never once existed.

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