LEAP F/W 2025 ACROSS THE SEA

For LEAP, the sea is less a fixed entity than a medium—carrying people, myths, goods, languages, and images across vast distances. In LEAP’s Fall/Winter 2025 issue, “Across the Sea,” we approach the ocean not merely as a subject, but as a way of thinking: fluid, relational, and resistant to fixed borders. Against a world increasingly organized by walls, checkpoints, and hardened identities, the sea offers another logic—one shaped by movement, exchange, and continual transformation.

The sea has long borne the weight of voluntary journeys and forced crossings, of trade routes and colonial violence, of exile, labor, and longing. In contemporary art, these histories resurface through personal genealogies, fragmented archives, and embodied memories. Artists and thinkers featured in this issue understand migration not as a singular event, but as an ongoing condition—one that reshapes language, cuisine, ritual, and the imagination itself. Foodways, in particular, emerge as a quiet yet powerful archive: recipes altered by scarcity, spices carried across oceans, and tastes that encode survival and adaptation.

Moving through coastal and island regions, “Across the Sea” brings together discourses and visual narratives rooted in life along the shore and on the water. These are places where histories accumulate in layers: ports marked by departure and return, islands shaped by both isolation and connection, and coastlines where ecological precarity meets cultural abundance. From beaches and harbors to archipelagos and deltas, the works gathered here trace how maritime environments generate distinct ways of seeing, remembering, and inhabiting the world. By attending to the cultural imprints of maritime traditions and reimagining our relationship with the sea, LEAP invites readers to think with the ocean—to embrace multiplicity over fixity, routes over roots, and interdependence over isolation.

Contents

A Book of Actions: Islands, Coastlines, and the Sea
Text by Long Yitang

From Mutiny to Diplomacy: Colonial and Post-Colonial Foodways in the Indo-Pacific
Text by Lou Mo

Mirage
Project by Zhang Xiao

Navigating through Loss at Sea—Beyond the Screens of Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, Séverine Sajous and Anna Surinyach
Text by Sara Quattrocchi Febles

Where the Tongue Catches on Stress: Sounds in Diaspora, Narrative at Its Limits
Text by Arden Yang Xian

Living in Limbo
Project by Vera Yijun Zhou

A Slow Return under the Monsoon
Text by Tan Sin Thiau

From Divine Maiden to Heavenly Empress: the Historical Formation of Mazu Belief and Maritime Imagination
Text by Zixi

Bad Dream Rocking a.k.a The Rocking Malay(a)
Project by Au Sow Yee and Chen Yow-Ruu

Taming Adventures: The Haier Brothers as Global Imagery
Text by Ding Dawei

The Untethered Ashes
Project by Beichen Zhang and Yantong Li