P001 → A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide
‘A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide’ is a participatory project that reimagines the language of children’s beach toys—buckets, shovels, molds—as early tools of spatial perception and anthropocentric world building. Through these familiar forms, Paula Proaño Mesías explores how play functions as rehearsal for environmental intimacy, cohabitation, and multispecies kinship.
Inspired by the biodiversity of Dadaepo Beach, the artist presents sculptural objects that invite activation by children and adults alike. These tools—part crustacean exoskeleton, part imagined marine organism—are conceived not as static artworks but as living instruments for gesture, speculation, and improvisation. Visitors are encouraged to pick up, rearrange, and inscribe movements into the sand or water. Acts traditionally framed as child’s play are reframed here as relational rituals—ephemeral performances that express our embeddedness within the environment.
Rooted in Mesías’s ongoing research into interspecies alliance, embodied knowledge, and more-than-human agency, A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide embraces porous, participatory modes of being that extend beyond human-centered perception. Her sculptural works—often conceived as prosthetic hybrids—echo the speculative biology of Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, where scientific observation meets aesthetic imagination. Like Haeckel’s drawings, which visualized unseen lifeforms and challenged the boundaries between art and biology, Mesías’s objects act as relational agents—tools for unlearning extractive habits and imagining multispecies cohabitation. By foregrounding instinct, movement, and touch, the project reclaims play as a mode of speculative kinship, attuned to the submerged, the invisible, and the entangled lifeforms that pulse beneath our feet.
Under the title ‘Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water’, the exhibition traces the subtle metabolic exchanges hidden between land and sea, seeking to reveal their invisible yet vital flows as part of our sensory and embodied experience. This edition of Sea Art Festival asks how the shifting metabolic rhythms of the sea intersect with our daily lives, and how these unseen processes might surface as shared awareness.
Commissioned by the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, 2025.