Installation view at exhibition Underwater, on Fire, UCCA Clay, China, 2025

Crystal Palace
Artist book
2025
Exhibition editions: 5



A fiction I wrote to accompany my installation at “Underwater, on Fire” (UCCA Clay Museum, 2025. 7.5 - 10.12) - The lost personal log of Dr. Lin on an oceanographic expedition that unfolds as a speculative archive, drifting between science, myth, and hallucination. Framed as a series of restricted field notes, the text conjures an underwater encounter with a site that is part ruin, part living organism - an architecture where geology, biology, and cosmology are entangled. Through sensory and ritual fragments, as well as shifting perceptions of matter, the log destabilises the boundary between research and revelation.

The narrative mirrors the exhibition’s central gesture: a practice of worldmaking where found matter, mythic imagination, and scientific inquiry coalesce into hybrid forms. Here, material evidence and embodied transformation blur together; ceramic shards echo celestial maps, biofilms spark metamorphosis, and ruins become embryos. Rather than offering linear discovery, the log immerses readers in a porous space where ecological trauma, diasporic memory, and elemental forces generate alternative cosmologies, suggesting that what lies “underwater” is not only submerged history, but also speculative futures waiting to surface.


© Shuyi Cao 2025