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curated by Caroline Ha ThucAri Bayuaji, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Faris Rizwan,
Lim Sokchanlina, Joar Songcuya, Juria Toramae,
Louis To Wun, Tsang Chui Mei
Exhibition Period: 8 November 2025 – 17 January 2026
Opening: Saturday, 8 November 2025, 4 - 8pm
5.30pm Joar Songcuya, Louis To Wun and Tsang Chui Mei in conversation moderated by Caroline Ha Thuc
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.
About the Artists:
Ari Bayuaji (b. 1975, Mojokerto, Indonesia) graduated as a civil engineer and worked in Indonesia before deciding to move to Canada permanently in 2005. Once in Montreal, he studied Fine Arts at Concordia University from 2005 to 2010 and now divides his time between Montreal and Bali. He is known mainly for his art installations that incorporate the use of found and ready-made objects he collects from various parts of the world, thereby exposing himself to the different cultural traditions.
Alongside international artist-in-residence programmes Bayuaji has participated in group shows in Denmark, Indonesia, Germany and the USA. A large sculptural installation is currently exhibited as part of the permanent collection of Montréal Museum of Fine Art, Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Canada, and the Taguchi Art Collection of Tokyo, Japan.
Charles Lim Yi Yong (b.1973) studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design London, UK, graduating in 2001. In 2002, he participated in Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany as a member of the net-art collective, tsunami.net.
His practice encompasses film, installation, sound, recorded conversations, text, drawing, and photography. For twenty years, he has developed a body of work entitled SEA STATE that explores the political, biophysical and psychic contours of the city-state of Singapore, largely through the visible and invisible lenses of the sea. SEA STATE premiered at the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and has since been shown at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, where he developed the work over a nine-month residency. Other iterations of SEA STATE have been exhibited at Manifesta 7, Trentino, Italy in 2008, the Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne, France in 2013, and at biennales in Shanghai, Singapore, and Osaka.
Faris Ridzwan (b.1993, Kedah, Malaysia) is a contemporary artist based in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia and has been active as both an art educator and a practicing artist for nearly a decade. His art reflects lived experiences, exploring beauty, transformation, and enlightenment
Faris has presented two solo exhibitions at G13 Gallery, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: ‘YOLO: Flowing Forward’ (2022) and ‘Atolls: A Journey Underneath’ (2024). His international presence has grown recently, with participation in the Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival (ASYAAF) (2024) (LVS Gallery, South Korea) and the Hotel Art Fair Bangkok, Thailand (2024). He has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions across Malaysia and the region, further establishing his profile in the contemporary art scene.
He has received notable recognition, including the Founder Award, Mr. DIY Art Competition 2023, the Gold Award, UOB Painting of the Year 2022 (Emerging Artist Category), and the Grand Prize, KAREX Art Against AIDS 2022, as well as selection among the Top 13 Artists at the MEA Awards 2022.
Born in 1987 in rural southeastern Cambodia, Lim Sokchanlina relocated to Phnom Penh early in life where he co-founded Sa Sa Art Projects, the country’s first independent artist collective. He works across documentary and conceptual practices with photography, video, installation, and performance; particularly drawn to the use and function of space where urban communities meet rural attitudes.
His practice mainly documents the dramatic transformation of Cambodia’s landscape, with particular focus on the proliferation of development projects. Sokchanlina’s works were featured in significant international exhibitions, including the 2019 Singapore Biennale and Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, in 2022.
Joar Songcuya is a Filipino self-taught painter and marine engineer whose work involves the politics of water, statelessness, and sea-based labour. He sailed the world for a decade and has travelled to over 50 countries. As a way of passing time, at the end of his shifts, he began recording his experiences on canvas, which continue to occupy a central role in his artistic career today.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Musafiri’ at HKW, 2025; ‘At The Edge of Land,’ Jameel Arts Centre, UAE, 2024; and ‘Pilgrimage to the Ancient Seas,’ Wan Gallery, Art Central Hong Kong, 2024. Songcuya lives and works in the Philippines.
Juria Toramae (b.1983) is a Singapore-based, Moroccan Thai artist whose work engages themes of cultural dislocation and the natural environment. She works at the intersection of video, photography, cartography, painting and installation. Toramae’s work has been presented at the Singapore Art Museum at 8Q, the Singapore International Photography Festival, The Photobook Exhibition for Athens Photo Festival, Greece; the Obscura Festival of Photography, Penang, Malaysia; the Chiang Mai University Art Center, Thailand; and The Substation, Singapore.
Born in 1971, Louis To Wun is a Hong Kong multi-media artist whose practice spans Chinese and Western painting, sculpture, and the traditional crafts of candy and bamboo sculpting, which he has self-taught and reimagined in contemporary forms. His first major solo exhibition took place at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1998, followed by international exposure in prestigious venues such as PS1 MoMA (2000) and the British Museum (2001).
Beyond painting, Louis To Wun has committed himself to preserving and advancing intangible cultural heritage by revitalizing traditional bamboo and candy sculpting through technical innovation and contemporary aesthetics. His first contemporary bamboo God ‘留白’ has been recently acquired by the Shenzhen Contemporary Art Museum.
Tsang Chui Mei (b. 1972) obtained her Bachelor (1996) and Master (2004) degrees in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996 and 2004. She is currently a lecturer in Hong Kong Art School's Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) programme (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). Recent exhibitions include: ‘When Will I See You Again’ at SC Gallery, Hong Kong (2022), ‘Day Or Night’ at Karin Weber Gallery, Hong Kong (2021), ‘ARTFEM Women Artists International Biennial of Macau’, Galeria Lisboa, Macau (2020). Her works are held by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Fringe Club, Hotel ICON, Hotel Stage, 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo – all in Hong Kong, the Philippe Charriol Foundation, and private collectors in Hong Kong and across Asia.
About the Curator:
Specialized in Asian contemporary art, Caroline Ha Thuc’s field of research focuses on research-based art practices and the emergence of alternative modes of knowledge production in Asia. Besides books on Japanese, Hong Kong and Chinese art, she published ‘Research-Based Art Practices in Southeast Asia: The Artist as Producer of Knowledge’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and ‘Ocean Manifesto’ (JBE Books, 2025), launched during the 2025 UN Conference for the Ocean. She contributes regularly to different magazines and is a lecturer at Lingnan University, Hong Kong where she is teaching curating practices.
As a curator, she focuses on pluri-disciplinary and research-based practices, aiming at promoting dialogue across cultures, while reflecting on social and political contemporary issues. Her recent exhibitions include ‘In Stranger Lands: Cocoa Journey’s to Asia’, a touring exhibition about the history and culture of cocoa in Asia; ’31 Women Artists Hong Kong’ (10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong 2022), ‘Boundless Sea: The Artist becoming Researcher’ at the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (Guangzhou, China 2021-2022).
Ha Thuc is the founder of Walden, an art residency in the South of France dedicated to artistic exchanges between Asia and France.
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