GROUP EXHIBITION

“The unity is not that of a single root, but that of a network of branches.”— Édouard Glissant

Departing from Glissant’s notion of archipelagic thinking—which privileges relation over root, opacity over transparency, and networks over hierarchies—this exhibition reimagines Southeast Asia not as a fixed region, but as an unfolding matrix of routes, fragments, and entangled affiliations. In this vision, the archipelago is not merely metaphor, but historical infrastructure: a living network of seaports, river deltas, and inland uplands that have long shaped the movement of people, images, and ideas across what is often reductively called “the South.”

Shanghai, as both a historic and symbolic node in this geography, becomes a point of departure. Located on the Bund—once a treaty port linking China to Southeast Asia through maritime trade, migration, and imperial encounters—Almine Rech’s gallery space serves as the staging ground for Seaport. This chapter centres outward-facing works charged with formal clarity, visual urgency, and mythic reconstruction.

The exhibition continues at Bao Room by Bao Foundation, a penthouse space nestled within the former French Concession. Sitting atop the city’s colonial strata, the site becomes both literal and symbolic upland—a conceptual and spatial counterpoint to Seaport. Here, in The Archipelagic Imagination: Upland, the exhibition turns inland: toward sedimented memory, embodied histories, and spiritual terrains that resist visibility yet pulse with presence.

Together, Seaport and Upland trace a conceptual and geographic dyad: one public, the other intimate; one attuned to surfaces and crossings, the other to depth and duration. From maritime edges to inland elevations, from visible flows to buried roots, the exhibition maps an archipelagic imagination that cuts across inherited definitions of region, identity, and cultural direction—gesturing toward a South assembled not by borders, but by relation.