November 9, 2024–April 6, 2025
To exist as Shanghai (a name which translates as “upper sea”) is to be born of rivers and seas, to rise through the churning currents of trade and flux. The Pacific, which cradles this place, is often seen as a site of inexhaustible resources, an ocean-wide quarry for extraction and territorialization. Against these visions that reduce the ocean to resource or boundary, we have reimagined Rockbund Art Museum’s ground floor as Wan Hai Hotel: a speculative hospitality space dedicated to the epistemology of seascapes, a place for unmooring, dismantling the borders that have framed the seas we depend upon.
Taking its name from a humble Chinatown hotel in Penang, Malaysia, Wan Hai Hotel (which translates as “Surrounded by the Sea Hotel”) reactivates the connective tissue of a global Chinatown network, a loose constellation unconfined by national boundaries. Within the tidal flows and oceanic bonds, a shared collective memory stretches across regions.
At the center of Wan Hai Hotel lies the vision of Tongan thinker Epeli Hauʻofa, whose definition of the Pacific as a “sea of islands” suggests a boundless expanse of continuity, shared histories, and flowing networks rather than isolated territories. Colonialism compressed these bodies of water into fixed borders, slicing across centuries-old kinships and migratory bonds, erasing the itineraries that had for so long connected peoples across the ocean’s surface. It laid the foundations for the nation-state, what Teresia K. Teaiwa identified as “severed boundaries and fractured relationships.” Yet Hauʻofa calls us back, invoking an oceanic way of being—a self that flows across relations, a unity continually emerging from motion.
From November 2024 to April 2025, Wan Hai Hotel hosts six gatherings of artists, scholars, musicians, and thinkers across the Pacific. Indigenous ocean knowledge and decolonial narratives guide the tide in these performances, lectures, and workshops. Participants include Amiu, Stephanie Comilang, FITNESSS, Taloi Havini, Yang Hui, Rindon Johnson, Arka Kinari, Xu Lu, Bhenji Ra, Renn, Ma Sai, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, Joshua Serafin, Zhang Wen, XIA, Jin Yanan, Liu Yijie, Long Yitang, and Zhan Zhaoxia.
Alongside these live programs, the Wan Hai Hotel lobby features works by artists Su Yu-Xin, Tong Yixin, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Yang Hui & Gao Shu, Cai Kunyu, Arka Kinari, and Miguel Covarrubias. At the reception desk are sculptures from Tong Yixin’s Petrified Seas series, in which the artist and angler craft a world suspended in mid-motion using clay and resin. This work evokes fossils drawn from the ocean depths, capturing remnants of prehistoric life as though frozen in geologic time. Esvin Alarcón Lam’s 2017 video piece Sail flutters as if it were the body of a ghostly ship. Over ten minutes, this sail, crafted from second-hand Chinese textiles, fights to remain aloft, mirroring the relentless persistence of time.
Suspended in the lobby, the paintings by Su Yu-Xin present images of the ocean uploaded to the internet, which are layered in pigment on hand-sculpted wood panels. The curved surfaces mimic the stilling of waves, allowing different bodies of water to collapse into a singular visual plane. In When the Plague Hits the Boats, video artist Yang Hui and scholar Dr. Gao Shu capture the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou boat-dwellers during the “Sending off the King Boat” ceremony. In Go with the Flow, director Cai Kunyu documents the Dan boat people of Fujian’s Jiulong River, whose water-bound way of life and amphibious knowledge have been strained by the “Dan People Return to Land policy.” Laut Loud, an online concert series, is led by the Arka Kinari, a ship traverses the ocean, collaborating with local musicians and artists to create soundscapes that engage in their shared oceanic space.
Wan Hai Hotel is organized by X Zhu-Nowell, Sam Shiyi Qian, and Joni Zhu; it echoes the current exhibition Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer and embodies Rockbund Art Museum’s ongoing inquiry into Complex Geographies.
About Rockbund Art Museum
Inaugurated in 2010, the Rockbund Art Museum is a non-profit arts organization located in Bund, Shanghai. The historical architecture hosting the museum, characterized by its Art Deco design, was operated as the first natural history museum in China. Rockbund Art Museum is developing an oceanic vision of contemporary art. By supporting bold contemporary art practices, we aim to continually remake local histories, whilst also responding to global art challenges and social mutations.
International press
Sarah Greenberg, Evergreen Arts: sgreenberg [at] evergreen-arts.com
For images: ppanagopoulos [at] evergreen-arts.com
Chinese press
Natalie Niu, Communication Manager, Rockbund Art Museum. natalie.niu [at] rockbundartmuseum.org
