Karin Weber Gallery is excited to announce its upcoming group show ‘All – Sea: Eight Oceanic Artistic Practices from Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.’ Curated by Caroline Ha Thuc, this exhibition serves as an invitation to reflect upon and acknowledge the sea that surrounds us—often overlooked despite its omnipresence. How might we engage with and relate to a living sea, governed by its own dynamics and rules?

The idea of ‘All-Sea’ derives from Edouard Glissant’s (1928-2011) notion of the ‘Tout-Monde’ (All-World). For the Caribbean poet and philosopher, this term designates a world defined by interconnection and perpetual transformation. ‘All-Sea’ features eight artists from Southeast Asia and Hong Kong whose works offer personal and artistic vision of the sea. The diversity of their chosen media resonates with the multiplicity of marine life forms. The exhibition path mirrors a descent, beginning at the luminous sea surface and gradually moving toward the darkness of the oceanic abyss.

Sea, Kep Province (2018) and Sea, Sihanoukville (2018) by Lim Sokchanlina take us to the contested limits between coastal ecologies and human interventions. The two photographs feature an image of a fence seemingly emerging from the sea. They belong to ‘Wrapped Future II’, a broader series depicting fences and borders that the artist has captured across the country.

A former professional and Olympic sailor, Charles Lim Yi Yong’s long-term SEA STATE project (2005- ongoing) attempts to break the usual tropes associated with the sea, namely its sublime or romantic side, and to reveal it as a highly economic, political and strategic space. SEA STATE 7 (2013), exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015, interrogates the shifting boundaries between land and sea in a context of reclamation projects and underwater constructions that have radically reshaped the landscape of Singapore.

Another a former sailor, Filipino artist Joar Songcuya has a long experience of the ocean shaped by his voyages to more than eighty-six ports worldwide. In his paintings, he portrays the sea as both a perilous force and a constant companion. Tidal Apparition (2021) draws upon ancient Filipino mythology, in which the sea goddess embodies a primeval force of creation. More figurative, The Sailor and the Prophesizer (2021) is a self-portrait representing the artist as a sailor on the aft deck on a vessel.

Three featured art installations by Ari Bayuaji belong to the artist’s ongoing ‘Weaving the Ocean Project.’ This community-based initiative focuses on the collection of abandoned plastic ropes, strings, and fishnets found in the mangroves and the sea, which are then transformed into artworks that offer a critical reflection on contemporary society’s treatment of the sea as an expansive dumping ground.

Seafood (2025), Louis To Wun’s latest creation, combines tradition with a contemporary–and whimsical –twist. The sculpture takes the form of a shrimp with a dragon’s head, a visual elaboration of the Chinese character for ‘lobster’, which literally means ‘dragon-shrimp.’

Faris Ridzwan comes from a lineage of artists rooted in Malaysia’s batik tradition. His paintings reimagine this textile legacy through a contemporary lens. In works like Drift and Bloom (2025) and Ovular Secret (2025), he draws on batik’s vivid colors and organic patterns but shifts the focus to marine life. Inspired by his dives along Malaysia’s coast, Ridzwan invites viewers to encounter the underwater world as he does—immersed, unbound, and free from conventional representation.

Hong Kong artist Tsang Chui Mei remains consistent to her abstract painting style conceived as inner landscapes. For her, the ocean is both the origin of life and a vast unknown—its abysses embody mystery, fear, and a profound sense of the limits of human knowledge. In her Tide Upon the Island Shore (2025), the undulating currents of paint capture the ocean’s rhythmic ebb and flow, suggesting the ceaseless negotiation between land and sea. Tsang layers pigment into shifting planes of color that evoke erasure, memory, and the fragility of place within the immensity of the sea.

Just like the ocean that moves, connects cultures and links territories, Juria Toramae’s video installation Uncanny Lagoon (2021) features fantastical marine organisms generated through artificial intelligence. These images originate from her own collection of underwater photographs taken in Singapore—an archive she began in 2013, when she joined a group of marine conservationists. Continuously shifting in form and freed from taxonomy or hierarchy, these hybrid organisms draw viewers into a dreamlike current that references both familiar biodiversity and the ocean’s still-unrevealed species.

From video to painting, textile and photography, ‘All Sea’ leads us through a path of exploration of different aspects of oceanic life, its social, ecological and, most of all, personal dimensions, expressed in the voices of eight artists who all connect to the ocean in their practice and as individuals.