Oystering Room, 2020

Coastal land subsidence results from over-pumping groundwater, a worldwide extractivist phenomenon from Jakarta to New Orleans, but especially in fish and shrimp ponds across Thailand and the Philippines. In such places, the surface of the Earth becomes a malleable skin mirroring the imbalance of the fluid extracted from the planetary body. Since the 1990s, the southwest coastal regions of Taiwan have been sinking almost 10 cm per year. In the face of intensive aquaculture that makes entire regions subside, one wonders what a transition from pumping-dependent territories could look like.

Oyster mariculture has long been present on the southwest coast of Taiwan. Grown nearshore, oysters do not need freshwater pumping. They are filter feeders, improving the state of the ocean as they breathe, ultimately building water. Their shells are a valuable source of lime, which their spat depend on to attach and form their own. Piles of oyster shells are time portals that lie idle along the roads of Tainan, Yunlin, Chiayi, or Pingtung Counties. They are the remnants of consumed oysters and the birth grounds of those to be soon consumed.

Oystering Room is inspired by the centuries-old local san ho tu technique—a binding paste mixing oyster shells, glutinous rice, and maltose sugar without cement. This new site-responsive installation uses Taiwanese discarded shells to reimagine the porous materiality of other water futures.

Teaming up with a group of Taiwanese experts on coastal ecology, material science, craft, and architectural heritage, a new san ho tu composite has been developed to reveal the morphology of these coastal inhabitants that live semipermanently underwater. Immersed in an audio narration to reimagine other ways of living with the coast, human visitors are invited to rest their bodies upon the repurposed shell surfaces, while applying an oyster shell exfoliating treatment on their skins, also developed for the occasion. While oyster histories penetrate your otoliths, scrubbing may cleanse your skin pores of unwanted matter, and perhaps make you dream of those oysters taking us into a new cosmos without exhausting the ground.