Undercurrents - Waves Walking on the Water
SEA ART FESTIVAL 2025, Busan Biennale
27.09. – 02.11.2025
www.saf2025.org
Subtle yet undeniably present, the undercurrent operates as a force that shapes and sustains societies, reconfiguring the relationships between human and non-human beings. By tracing its subtle movements, coexistence emerges not as a fixed state but as a fluid and evolving mode of being. Flowing beneath and beyond established orders, the undercurrent gently displaces normative frameworks, offering us a space to reflect how we perceive, relate, and dwell.
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 converage, 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 explores the invisible metabolic flows hidden between land and sea, asking how these rhythms intersect with our daily lives, and how they might surface as shared sensory awareness.
The subtitle Waves Walking on the Water evoke a poetic gesture: the layered movements of bodies—human, non-human, elemental—tracing paths across and beneath the sea’s surface. It suggests that undercurrents are not merely hidden below, but emerge through the interplay between the visible and the invisible, the floating and the submerged.
The seemingly paradisiacal landscape—with its vast, open skies and one of the most breathtaking sunsets in Korea—conceals a more complex reality. Ecological damage here—caused by the construction of estuarine floodgates, massive sedimentation, and industrial-scale fishing practices—is not immediately visible. These wounds lie underwater, embedded in the metabolic rhythms of the sea. What we perceive is a pristine surface, but beneath it flow disrupted ecologies and silent losses.
With 23 artistic positions, and newly commissioned works for this year´s Sea Art Festival, the exhibition traces a journey through coastal thresholds—from incinerated grounds to restored wetlands—each site revealing the metabolic forces shaping this place. It highlights the hidden presences that emerge in the liminal space between land and sea, and composes a new terrain shaped by hybridity, circulation, and transformation. Can the ceaselessly shifting and circulating waves foster 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.
