They lived in an era with such a limited scope for social advancement; the lower-class men officially derided as “neither man nor woman,” “monsters,” or “beasts” chose to seek potential means of survival by disguising themselves and crossing gender boundaries.

There is a quiet resistance in the act of paying attention. We live in an era increasingly enclosed by algorithmic efficiency, predictive optimization, and industrialized digital systems. Our devices know tomorrow’s weather before we look outside, calculate the fastest route home before we leave, and translate our sleep, moods, and health into neat streams of…

In recent years, the field of contemporary Chinese art has seen a growing number of practice-based projects initiated by curators, artists, and institutions. Whether working alone during brief island or port residencies, or traveling collectively along expansive coastlines, these practitioners engage with long-standing maritime rituals—such as boat-sending ceremonies—and observe newly developed marine infrastructure.

The residues of these histories still drift within the everyday lives of Southeast Asian Chinese, rendering “localization” anything but a clear or uncontested option.

Around the turn of the millennium, we accepted and embraced The Haier Brothers—whether actively or passively—not only because of its pervasive airtime, but because it had become a “prescribed image.”

Confucian moral instruction and the sea-goddess belief centered on Meizhou Island—systems that had once existed in relative independence and represented the divide between official and popular spheres, center and periphery, land and sea—gradually converged in the modern period, woven into a unified ideological formation.

Cha, in her semi-conscious, ritualized writing, constructs fleeting linguistic sanctuaries for the fallen of her nation. Naipaul, by contrast, summons the ghosts of history back into the text, laying bare the delicate, exposed interior of the colonized subject.

Very often, even though the taste of home follows us, it is not necessarily home, and can also come from distant shores.

For four artists, moving image becomes the tool to document loss in relation to the sea, capturing the complex narratives that exist beyond its uncontrollable nature.

As I was told, once the last ecologically conscious pavilion has flat-packed its building and left, the site will be transformed into a major casino-resort. From the ruins of the Cloud rises a new totem to Capital.

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…

“Without bamboo, one becomes vulgar; without meat, one grows thin.”

This non-linear, anti-sovereign vision of landscape offers a path of learning in ecological art—not about “knowledge of mountains,” but about the ability to coexist with mountains.

We’re always chasing what’s already been validated—those things that are constructed and explained by professionals—while neglecting the everyday.

Ethnography, then, is also a form of making—one that generates heterogeneity within the field itself. It dialogues with art at the level of practice—how reality is perceived, understood, and transformed. Indeed, it is such moments of entanglement, confusion, struggle, and vulnerability within concrete practices and research that often mark a shared point of departure for both artistic and ethnographic creation.

The paintings in “Searching the Sky for Gold” share the aesthetics of Asian American and diasporic Asian poets in the U.S. who in recent decades, write in response to historical atrocities. Across pages and canvases, the recurrent smoke-clouds, rings of dust, and licks of flames are entangled with the labor and persecution of Asian immigrants on the colonized land of America.

In every family, perhaps, there are skeletons in the closet. In ours, there is certainly that, and Granddad’s presence was like a mountain hiding in plain sight. It was there, silently sitting in the family for decades.

In the end, the impoverishment we perceive in this image, like that of the southwest women portrayed, demands more than a passive acceptance of the established aesthetic formula. Unless we engage with these images in a way that is grounded in real emotion and lived experience, our seeing remains hollow.

Crossing a single ridge reveals a myriad of differences, from the very soil to the local language. I have now resided here for two years, in this inland pocket between Sichuan and Yunnan. My sense of the place constantly evolves with its accumulating contrasts. My first lessons came from friends close by, whose practices seem rooted in the mountain soil itself.

Mountains, as commonplace as they may seem, embody a quiet constancy imbued with vast symbolic resonance. They have loomed in our collective imagination as both refuge and challenge—sacred realms, geological fortresses, and sites of ancestral memory. In LEAP’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue, “To the Mountains,” we turn our gaze upward and inward, to engage with the…