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Theme

This year’s Sea Art Festival begins at the unique coastal geography where the Nakdong River meets the sea. Located in Saha-gu, where Mount Ami, the river estuary, and the South Sea converge, Dadaepo is defined by the constant collision and merging of waters with differing densities—a place where new ecological and cultural narratives are continuously generated. Under the title Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water, the exhibition traces the subtle metabolic exchanges hidden between land and sea, seeking to reveal their invisible yet vital flows as part of our sensory and embodied experience. It asks how the shifting metabolic rhythms of the sea intersect with our daily lives, and how these unseen processes might surface as shared awareness.

This exhibition unfolds through the poetic image evoked by its subtitle, Waves Walking on the Water—a gesture that calls forth the delicate movements and submerged voices of layered beings. It suggests that the undercurrent does not reside solely beneath the surface, but arises through the entanglement of what is seen and unseen, what floats above and pulses below.

Between land and sea, a quiet metabolism persists—a ceaseless exchange shaped by erosion and renewal, wounding and care, extraction and resistance. The waves that walk across the water are not only the footsteps of those who pass along the shore, nor merely the strokes of surfers slicing through the sea. They are also the faint tracks of crabs moving across the tidal flats, the seasonal arrival of birds carried by unseen winds, the slow drift of sand and breath of salt air. They are the gestures of material and immaterial presences—rendered in rhythm, repetition, and return.

The exhibition journeys through coastal thresholds—from incinerated ground to restored wetlands—each revealing the metabolic energies shaping this place. It highlights the hidden presences that emerge in the liminal space between land and sea, and composes a new landscape shaped by hybridity, circulation, and transformation. Can the ceaselessly circulating and shifting waves offer us deeper human connections and awaken new sensory energies? This exhibition examines how the ecological rhythms and metabolic flows of undercurrents quietly permeate local culture, coastal communities, and everyday life shaped by tourism. The fluctuating rhythms of undercurrents pose urgent and generative questions: How do these unseen processes permeate our daily lives? How might we cultivate a collective, embodied awareness of such flows—especially when they carry both wounds and wisdom? At the same time, the exhibition invites us to confront the histories of ecological violence embedded in these landscapes—while recognizing the power of collective care to restore, reimagine, and reclaim. It calls us to move beyond a familiar gaze fixed on the sea’s surface—guiding us instead toward the discovery of layered, polyphonic, and hybrid landscapes concealed beneath.

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