Kuroshio (2025) 21 minutes two-channel video installation 16:9, color, sound
Kuroshio, or “Black Tide,” refers to a deep blue ocean current that joins with other Pacific currents to connect the islands of Taiwan, Ryukyu, Japan, Hawaiʻi, Aleut and Philippines among others as well as the continental coasts of the Americas. The installation, Kuroshio, presented as part of the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025: Aloha Nō—consisting of a two-channel video diary, hand-painted wall mural, dream drawing series, and moena —honors the Kuroshio current. Together the works trace relationships between Nihon Rettō and Ka Paeʻāina o Hawaiʻi, across salt water, stories, languages, material practices and songs.
The two-channel video diary is inspired by journeys across thousands of years of hyoryumin, or drifters, seafarers who survived shipwreck, and drifted on the Kuroshio across the great Pacific Ocean, Moananui. One such story as recalled by Mōʻī Kalākaua in The Legends and Myths of Hawaiʻi (1888) is set in the 14th century off the coast of Nā Wai ʻEha, The Four Great Waters on the island of Maui. Moments filmed with family and friends in Kīhei, Waiheʻe, Honolulu, Kahoʻolawe, Nakameguro and Tōhoku, are woven together, activating melodic and sometimes dissonant connections between daily rituals, sacred places, elemental forces, cultural memories and resistance movements. Two popular songs, Aloha ʻOe (1878) by Mōʻī Wāhine Liliʻuokalani and Shima Uta (1992) by The Boom, carry historical weight and serve as reminders of the political formations and personal intimacies that shape us. Feelings of joy, loss, love, and transformation, swell between chatter at a family grave, stacking stones at a loko iʻa, drunken karaoke nights, string games, Jomon stone circles, tending to soramame, cleaning fish, buzzing bees, wind shaped wiliwili, and bumpy mule rides.