Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

To exist as Shanghai (a name which translates literally 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 most often seen as a site of inexhaustible resources, an ocean-wide quarry for extraction, for territorialization. Against these visions that reduce the ocean to resource or boundary, we have reimagined our ground floor as Wan Hai Hotel: a speculative hotel dedicated to the epistemology of seascapes, a space for unmooring, dismantling the borders that have framed and harnessed the seas we depend upon.

At the center of Wan Hai Hotel lies the expansive vision of Tongan thinker Epeli Hauʻofa, who defies the reduction of the Pacific to “islands in a far sea.” Here, his “sea of islands” manifests: a boundless expanse of continuity, crisscrossed lines, shared histories, and flowing networks rather than isolated territories. Colonialism, the great consolidator, compressed these bodies of water into fixed borders, compartmentalizing the ocean into fenced-in lands, 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, that monumental fixity, 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 being woven from multidimensional links, a unity continually emerging from motion, from an interconnected life that evades partition.

Echoing the exhibition Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer, Wan Hai Hotel embodies Rockbund Art Museum’s ongoing inquiry into Complex Geographies. In Johnson’s work, themes of personal history, modern capitalism, militarism, and the inherited traumas of the slave trade are unraveled to expose questions of belonging, autonomy, exploitation, value, and waste.

Taking its name from a humble Chinatown hotel in Penang, Malaysia, Wan Hai Hotel reactivates the connective tissue of a global Chinatown network, a loose constellation unconfined by national boundaries. Here, within the tidal flows and oceanic bonds, we gather resilience—a shared collective memory that stretches across regions and erases the arbitrary.

From November to April 2025, Wan Hai Hotel will host six gatherings, each spanning one to two days, converging artists, scholars, musicians, and thinkers from across the Pacific. In these sessions of performance, lectures, and workshops, Indigenous ocean knowledge and decolonial narratives will guide the tide. Alongside these live programs, the Wan Hai Hotel lobby will feature works by artists such as Su Yu-Xin, Tong Yixin, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Yang Hui & Gao Shu, Cai Kunyu, Arka Kinari, and Miguel Covarrubias, with monthly project updates published in Wan Hai Times.

Suspended in the lobby, the paintings by Su Yu-Xin explore the intersection of diverse disciplines and sensitivities. For Su, painting is a mode of reflecting on the material world, re-inventing histories of natural and cultural exchange, and foregrounding the painter’s role amid histories of war and migration. In these paintings, images of the ocean uploaded to the internet simultaneously are layered in pigment on hand-sculpted wood panels treated with gesso. The curved surfaces mimic the stilling of waves, allowing different bodies of water to collapse into a singular visual plane.

Displayed at the reception desk are sculptures from Yi Xin Tong’s Petrified Seas series. An artist and avid angler, Tong began this work in 2021, crafting a world suspended in mid-motion using clay and resin. This work evokes fossils drawn from the ocean depths, capturing remnants of organic matter and prehistoric life forms, as though frozen in geologic time.

Also on display at the reception desk is Esvin Alarcón Lam’s 2017 video piece Sail. A sail, anchored by rocks and trees, flutters as if it were the body of a ghostly ship. Here, the wind takes on a new form, one that might symbolize time: it circles around the sail, swaying it in a gentle confrontation with the landscape. Over ten minutes, this sail, crafted from secondhand Chinese textiles, fights to remain aloft before it inevitably disappears, mirroring the relentless persistence of time. Filmed at the Ipalá crater in Chiquimula, Guatemala—a land where Alarcón Lam’s great-grandfather, Porfirio Lam Rey, settled after a journey from Guangzhou to Guatemala—the sail draws a fragile line between geographies, reflecting political and familial histories woven into the artist’s own body.

In the lounge, three continuous films set a rhythm. When the Plague Hits the Boats, by video artist Yang Hui and scholar Dr. Gao Shu, captures the boat-dwellers of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou 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 policy of “Dan People Return to Land.” Laut Loud, an online concert series, is led by the floating platform Arka Kinari, a ship that since 2019 has traversed the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific. Collaborating with local musicians and artists, Arka Kinari channels voices bound to each island, exploring soundscapes that speak to local cultures and experiences, engaging deep and wide in their shared oceanic space.

Welcome to our Wan Hai Hotel, a new space of hospitality that expands and interweaves—a perpetually evolving space, a gathering of tides in constant motion.

Esvin Alarcón Lam

Esvin Alarcón Lam (Guatemala, 1988) works across a range of disciplines such as painting, sculpture, performance, photography, sound, and video. His projects are grounded in the desire to create spaces for critical, affective relations with the past taking materiality and abstract forms as starting points. An important aspect of his practice is his belief that artists and art should contribute to shaping a public sphere and advancing social encounters. Alarcón Lam’s recent work has been intensively exploring his Chinese ancestry and revisiting history from a queer perspective. Informed by his family’s history of immigration, the artist addresses the architecture and material culture produced by the Chinese diaspora in Central America to highlight the various community forms of negotiation with memory.Esvin Alarcón Lam's work has been presented at: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); The Americas Society, New York (2024, 2014); BPA Raum, Berlin (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico (2024); Arco Madrid, Spain (2024); Fundación March, Madrid (2024); Casa de Cultura do Parque, São Paulo (2023); Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York (2021); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá (2021); Abrons Arts Center, New York (2021); Univeridade de Brasilia, Brazil (2019); Bienal en Resistencia, Guatemala City (2019); Casa Tomada, Gibara, Cuba (2019); Osage Foundation, Hong Kong (2018), among others. Lam has been artist-in-residence in Art Omi, New York (2021), Masaha, Misk Art Institute, Saudi Arabia (2021), Residencia de Al Lado, Lima (2018), Hidrante, Puerto Rico (2018), and OCA/ CAL, Brazil (2017). Lam received a research travel grant by the Foundation of Arts Initiatives, New York (2018). He is currently Berlin based as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program. He also organizes the artistic research independent residency program @PagodaImaginaria in Guatemala. He is currently working on his first solo institutional exhibition in Germany, which will open in January 2025 in Daadgalerie, Berlin.

Cai Kunyu

Cai Kunyu (b.1997, Zhangzhou, Fujian) is a director and cinematographer with both bachelor's and master's degrees from the Beijing Film Academy. He has served on directing teams for multiple feature films and has extensive experience in commercial TVC production. His films, Rest in Peace and Go with the Flow, have been selected for international film festivals, including the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and the FIRST International Film Festival.

Su Yu-Xin

Su Yu-Xin (b.1991, Taiwan) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2016 with an MFA in Painting; she also holds an MFA in Painting and BFA in Chinese Painting from the Taipei National University of The Arts (TNUA). She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She collects, studies, and processes the color substances scattered on the earth’s crust and then invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation. Her landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, organic and synthetic matters, connecting and recollecting localities across continents that bear the weight of individual and collective memories.

Su considers painting a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect, and places particular emphasis on the medium of painting as reflecting the discovery and re-invention of the material world. In her view, paintings bear witness to the history of the exchange between cultures and nature and project the painter's role through wars and migrations; they manifest territorial invasions and restitutions, as well as the exploitation of pigments and their trades.

Her recent solo exhibitions include: “Precious”, Albion Jeune, London, 2024; “Dust that Rides the Wind”, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, 2023; “Parallel Impressionism”, Liste Art Fair Basel, online, 2020; “Almost No Memory”, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2020; “A Hue to Spell”, KuanDu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei, 2019. Selected group exhibitions include: “One and All: New Artistic Styles of Contemporary Painting”, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2024; “The Revenant”, Dual Presentation with MadeIn Gallery, Frieze LA, Los Angeles, 2024; “Upstairs Cities”, ASE Foundation, Shanghai, 2023; “New Moroism”, White Cube, Hong Kong, 2023; “Uncanny Valley”, Gagosian, Hong Kong, 2023; “Michael Ho, Su Yu-Xin, Hiroka Yamashita”, Blum & Poe, Tokyo, 2023; “I Feel the Way You Feel”, Perrotin, Shanghai, 2023; “Magic Square: Art and Literature in Mirror Image”, 2022; Beijing Biennial, Friendship Art Community, Beijing, China, 2022-23, “The Rearview Landscape, or a Trip of Ownership”, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, Hebei province, China, 2021-22; “In the Labrylinth”, Edouard Malingue gallery, Shanghai, 2021; “Let Painting Talk”, Taikang Space, Beijing, 2020-21; “The Eighth Huayu Youth Award Exhibition: A Long Hello”, UCCA, Beijing, 2020; ”Blue”, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai, 2020; “The Picture Is Not at Ease”, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2020; “hic sunt leones”, 798 Art Centre, Beijing, 2019; “Taiwan Biennial - Wild Rhizome”, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2018; “Building Code Violation III, Special Economic Zone”, Long March Space, Beijing, 2018; “Trembling Surfaces”, Long March Space, Beijing, 2016; “Future Island”, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2016; “Refuse: Refuge: Re-fuse”, The Koppel Project, London, 2016; “Small press project”, University College London, London, 2016.

Yi Xin TONG

Tong acts covertly and makes noise. Through playful and seemingly fortuitous ways, he creates objects, moving images and line works, to explore wilderness and absurdity, to understand the world he is in, and to interfere with reason and rules. Born on Mount Lu, Tong studied geology at China University of Geosciences in Beijing and received his BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University and MFA in Studio Art from New York University. Tong’s work has been exhibited at Brooklyn BRIC Biennial, Göteborg Biennial, OCAT Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Today Art Museum, chi K11 art museum, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Power Station of Art, and Hessel Museum of Art. In 2021, he won the inaugural Choi Foundation Prize for Contemporary Art.

Yang Hui

Yang Hui is a researcher of local culture and history as well as a documentary filmmaker. He graduated from Xiamen University. Utilizing video as his primary medium, Yang focuses on history and memory as central themes in his work. His notable projects include Bijia Mountain No. 6, The Bihu Project, A Place Called Streets and Alleys, and The Floating Residents, among others.

Gao Shu

Dr. Gao Shu is the deputy editor of China Intangible Cultural Heritage produced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, researcher and master's supervisor at the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, Chinese National Academy of Arts.

Arka Kinari

Arka Kinari is a floating cultural platform to sound the alarm on climate change and build networks of resilience in coastal communities. Traveling by sail and powered by renewable energy, it is both method and message. In ports Arka Kinari transforms into a stage for an audiovisual performance by the artists Filastine & Nova, as well as hosting workshops, talks, and concerts by local musicians. Arka Kinari has sailed over thirty thousand nautical miles, stopped in twenty-three nations, and is currently touring her home waters of the Indonesian archipelago.

上海，因江海相连而兴起，是全球流动与多元文化的熔炉。上海依傍的太平洋，覆盖了地球表面三分之一的广阔水域，在现代地理学家的视野中却常常被简化为资源储存地和军事战场。11月8日起，上海外滩美术馆将把一楼空间转变成一个限时的“环海旅社”, 邀请您通过“海洋景观知识论”重新审视我们所依赖的水域，解构这种工业化和军事化的海洋观。

“环海旅社”深受汤加学者艾培力·郝欧法（Epeli Hauʻofa）“岛屿之海”概念的启发。郝欧法挑战了“远海中的岛屿”这一狭隘观念，揭示出太平洋中的岛屿并非孤立的碎片，而是一个紧密相连的网络。帝国主义的侵袭将原本无边无际的海洋压缩成边界森严的领土，将人们隔离在狭小的空间中。殖民主义的分割摧毁了原本流动的生态，将岛屿分割成今天的国家和领土，阻断了人们跨越海洋的迁徙与联系数百年来所建立的亲情与文化联系。这一殖民压迫不仅在太平洋重演，更在全球范围内不断延续，至今未消。学者特蕾西亚·K·特艾瓦（Teresia K. Teaiwa）称其为“分离的边界和断裂的关系”。我们希望通过郝欧法所描述的海洋民族来反思自我身份，这种存在方式是流动的、多层的且复杂的，重在关系整体中的存在。
“环海旅社”项目作为当前展览“林顿·约翰逊：最佳合成答案”的平行项目，延续了上海外滩美术馆对“复杂地理”持续研究的探索。林顿·约翰逊的展览将个人经验、现代资本主义、军事霸权和奴隶贸易的复杂关系编织在一起，引发对归属、自由、自主、剥削、价值和浪费的深刻质问。“环海旅社”则受马来西亚槟城一家华埠小旅馆的启发，通过连接全球华埠网络，构建一种全新的海洋关系。我们邀请您进入一个流动的时空，在此挑战静态、有边界的地理学框架，以海洋为纽带，探索一种超越地域和文化的集体记忆和韧性。
从11月到次年4月，“环海旅社”将举办六场为期一至两天的表演、讲座和工作坊，带来泛太平洋地区艺术家、学者与音乐家的多元声音，聚焦于原住民知识论和去殖民化叙事。除了以活动为基的项目，“环海旅社”也将展出苏予昕，童义欣，Esvin Alarcón Lam，杨晖&高舒，蔡坤宇，Arka Kinari，龙奕塘和马赛，Miguel Covarrubias等艺术家的作品，以及呈现不断在建立中的环海阅览室。

“环海旅社”项目作为当前展览“林顿·约翰逊：最佳合成答案”的平行项目，延续了上海外滩美术馆对“复杂地理”持续研究的探索。林顿·约翰逊的展览将个人经验、现代资本主义、军事霸权和奴隶贸易的复杂关系编织在一起，引发对归属、自由、自主、剥削、价值和浪费的深刻质问。“环海旅社”则受马来西亚槟城一家华埠小旅馆的启发，通过连接全球华埠网络，构建一种全新的海洋关系。我们邀请您进入一个流动的时空，在此挑战静态、有边界的地理学框架，以海洋为纽带，探索一种超越地域和文化的集体记忆和韧性。

从11月到次年4月，“环海旅社”将举办六场为期一至两天的表演、讲座和工作坊，带来泛太平洋地区艺术家、学者与音乐家的多元声音，聚焦于原住民知识论和去殖民化叙事。除了以活动为基的项目，“环海旅社”也将展出苏予昕，童义欣，Esvin Alarcón Lam，杨晖&高舒，蔡坤宇，Arka Kinari，龙奕塘和马赛，Miguel Covarrubias等艺术家的作品，以及呈现不断在建立中的环海阅览室。

艾斯文·阿拉尔孔·林

艾斯文·阿拉尔孔·林（1988年生于危地马拉）是一位涉足绘画、雕塑、表演、摄影、声音和视频等多领域的跨界艺术家。他的创作旨在通过探索物质性和抽象形式，搭建与历史进行批判性和情感性对话的桥梁。他认为艺术家与艺术应积极参与公共领域的构建，促进社会互动。近年来，阿拉尔孔·林深入探索了自己的华裔血统，并以酷儿视角重新审视历史。从自身家族移民历史出发，他聚焦中部美洲华人移民创造的建筑和物质文化，强调社群记忆形式的多样性。

展出阿拉尔孔·林作品的机构包括：柏林世界文化宫（2024）、纽约美洲协会（2024、2014）、柏林BPA Raum（2024）、波多黎各当代艺术博物馆（2024）、马德里当代艺术博览会（ARCO，2024）、马德里March基金会（2024）、圣保罗公园文化之家（Casa de Cultura do Parque，2023）、纽约莱斯利·洛曼博物馆（2021）、巴拿马当代美术馆（2021）、纽约Abrons艺术中心（2021）、巴西巴西利亚大学（2019）、危地马拉城抵抗双年展（2019）、古巴吉希拉被占的宅子（2019）、香港 Osage艺术基金会（2018）等等。阿拉尔孔·林曾在纽约Art Omi（2021）、沙特阿拉伯米斯克艺术学院Masaha（2021）、利马Residencia de Al Lado（2018）、波多黎各Hidrante（2018）和巴西OCA/CAL（2017）担任驻地艺术家。他于2018年获得了纽约Foundation for Arts Initiatives的研究旅行奖金。他目前正在柏林DAAD艺术家奖项驻留。他还在危地马拉组织独立艺术研究驻留项目“想象之塔”（@PagodaImaginaria）。他正筹备自己在德国的首个个展，预计将于2025年1月在柏林DAAD画廊开幕。

蔡坤宇

蔡坤宇（1997年出生于福建漳州），导演，摄影指导。本硕均毕业于北京电影学院。 参加过多部院线电影的导演组工作，同时也有大量商业TVC广告的拍摄经验。导演影片有《入土为安》《蜉蝣》等，曾入选台北金马影展、First惊喜电影展等国内外数十个电影节展。

苏予昕

苏予昕，1991年生于台湾，2016年于英国伦敦大学斯莱德美术学院研究所毕业。目前创作于洛杉矶。苏予昕将绘画视为是多种学科，各种感性能力相互交涉的场所。长久以来，画家身处整个视觉工业的一环，绘画的演进折射着物质世界的发现与再创造。绘画不仅见证了文化和自然交流的历史，也投射着画家在战争及迁徙史中的角色 ; 涉及风景的侵占与归还、颜色的开采与其牵动的贸易史。当绘画的历史专注在梳理图像风格的演进时，色彩的科技正不间断地演化——苏予昕采集、研制、加工这些散布于地壳之上的色彩元件，并在画布上描绘、挤压、堆叠出新的秩序，对她来说，如此的风景绘画是一种重新布置矿物、植披、有机与人造物的地质学实践。

近期举办或参加过的重要展览包括：“苏予昕：Precious”，Albion Jeune，伦敦，2024；“命名的时刻”，ASE基金会，上海，2024；“共贯与多元：当代绘画艺术新样态”，中国美术馆，2024；“苏予昕：走尘”，Longlati基金会，上海，2023；“幻方：艺术与文学的互映”，北京艺术双年展，北京，2022-23； “后视景观：一段关于所有权的旅程”，UCCA沙丘，北戴河，中国，2021-2022； “绘画有声”，泰康空间，北京，中国，2021； “第八届华宇青年奖入围展：漫长的问候”，UCCA尤伦斯当代艺术中心，北京，中国，2020；个人项目“平行印象主义”， 巴塞尔Liste艺术博览会，线上，2020；“图像感到了不安”，没顶画廊，上海，中国，2020；个人项目“几乎没有记忆”，没顶画廊，上海，2020；“用色拼字”，关渡美术馆，台北，2019；“此地有狮”，798艺术中心，北京，2019；“野根茎”，亚洲艺术双年展，台湾美术馆，台中，2018；“违章建筑III - 特区”，长征空间，北京，2018； “平面震颤”，长征空间，北京，2016；“未来岛屿”，萨奇美术馆，伦敦，2016; “Refuse: Refuge: Re-fuse”, The Koppel Project, 伦敦，2016；“独立出版计划” ，伦敦大学，伦敦，2016。苏予昕于2020年入围第八届华宇青年奖。

童义欣

童隐蔽行动、制造噪音。通过戏谑和看似偶然的方式创作物件、影像和写画，探索荒野和荒诞，理解他身处的世界，干预理性和规章。童生于庐山，曾在北京中国地质大学学习地质学，之后毕业于西蒙菲沙大学视觉艺术专业和纽约大学工作室艺术硕士专业。他的作品曾在布鲁克林BRIC双年展，哥德堡双年展，OCAT双年展，东京宫，尤伦斯当代艺术中心，今日美术馆，Para Site藝術空間，上海chi K11美术馆，当代加拿大艺术馆，国立台湾美术馆，上海当代艺术博物馆，赫塞尔美术馆等地展出。2021年，童荣获首届蔡冠深基金会当代艺术奖。

杨晖 & 高舒

杨晖厦门大学毕业，地方文史研究者、纪录片工作者，长期以影像为媒介，以历史和记忆为主线贯穿工作始终。主要艺术创作有“笔架山6号”、“碧湖计划”、“一个叫街头巷尾的地方”、“水居之民”等。

高舒

博士，文旅部《中国非物质文化遗产》副主编、中国艺术研究院中国非物质文化遗产保护中心研究员、硕导。

Arka Kinari

漂浮文化平台Arka Kinari旨在敲响气候变化的警钟并在沿海社群建立抵抗网络。以帆航行，以可循环能源驱动，Arka Kinari既是方法也是讯息。在海港停靠时，Arka Kinari会转变为艺术家斐拉斯汀&诺瓦的视听演出舞台，并组织当地音乐家举办工作坊、讲座、和音乐会。Arka Kinari已经航行三万海里，在二十三个国家停留，目前正在她的故乡——印度尼西亚群岛的水域巡航。